Thanks for your wonderful response to my novelty tomato - you
obviusly did a lot of research to present this information, and I
really appreciate it! And this explains it quite well --- had I
sliced the tomato up soon after I bought it rather than letting it
sit around over a week, it would never have had the time to
germinate.
A friend of mine who recently graduated from Penn State University
has passed the photos on to a few of her scientific friends. I'll
let you know what, if anything, they add to it.
Thanks again,
Mickie

"mel turner" wrote in message
...
Sounds like the tomato plant that produced the fruit may have had a
mutation of some sort affecting some of the hormonal mechanisms that
normally inhibit germination of seeds when they are still inside the
fruit.

Precocious germination of seeds when a fruit is still attached to a
mother plant ["vivipary"] sometimes occurs as an abnormality

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives...6635.Bt.r.html

and is normal in some plants [esp. various mangroves].

http://www.agralin.nl/wda/abstracts/ab1140.html
says regarding tomatos and the plant hormone ABA [abscisic acid]:

"In wild-type seeds embryo-produced ABA is responsible for the
development of dormancy during seed development. ABA-deficient
seeds germinate viviparously in over-ripe fruits. Germination of
wild-type seeds is also inhibited after harvest."

http://hcs.osu.edu/hcs200/notes3.htm [some general lecture
notes on seeds, dormancy etc.]

"Chemical inhibition (physiological dormancy). Chemical inhibitors
to germination (e.g., caffeic acid, coumarin) can be present in the
embryo itself, in the seed coat or in the fruit tissue surrounding
the seed. These compounds must be metabolically inactivated, leached,
degraded or removed in some other way before germination can occur.
For instance, the gelatinous material surrounding a tomato seed
contains an inhibitor which prevents the seed from germinating
inside the fruit. This inhibitor must be removed prior to germination."

http://hort.cabweb.org/SeedSci/Pdfs/ssr08385.pdf

describes precociously-germinating or viviparous mutants of
chinese cabbage, with references about other cases in other
plants including tomato.

"However, detailed studies are limited to maize (Robertson, 1955),
tomato (Groot and Karssen, 1992) and Arabidopsis..."

The cited reference is:

Groot, S. P. C. and C. M. Karssen, 1992. Dormancy and germination
of abscisic acid-deficient tomato seeds: Studies with the _sitiens_
mutant. Plant Physiology 99: 952-958.

Sounds like a similar mutation. If so, it's perhaps
physiologically interesting, but not desirable agriculturally
[Who'd want to eat a tomato full of sprouted tomato seedlings?]

cheers