My phone died, so I’m catching up with podcasts. One I listen to is by the people behind QI, No Such Thing As A Fish. This week’s episode, No Such Thing As A Killer Tomato, starts with a brief discussion of tomatoes.

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Quite interesting, but not entirely right. The papers got over-excited in 2009 by the paper Murderous plants: Victorian Gothic, Darwin and modern insights into vegetable carnivory by Chase et al. when it mentioned wild tomatoes possibly catch small insects. It’s a good paper, but it’s not strong evidence for a killer tomato. Instead it could be evidence for proto-carnivory, which might be a step on the way to becoming a carnivorous plant.

However, in 2010 PLOS One published Turning the Table: Plants Consume Microbes as a Source of Nutrients by Paungfoo-Lonhienne et al. Paungfoo-Lonhienne’s team found that roots from Tomato (and Arabidopsis) absorbed microbes, and then broke them down in the roots. The clever bit was tagging the Nitrogen in the microbes with ¹⁵N. When the plant’s leaves were tested a couple of weeks later, the team found elevated levels of ¹⁵N in the leaves, showing the nutrients had moved from the microbes into the plant tissues and the microbe had been eaten.

Which shows there is such a thing as a killer tomato.