Comparing commonly grown species and native varieties is a winning strategy for making the former more resilient and the latter more productive.

You all know tomatoes and potatoes. African eggplants, maybe not—but when ripe, they turn red just like tomatoes. The lulo, for its part, is an orange fruit with citrusy notes, which is why in Ecuador it’s called naranjilla, or “little orange.” The Andean pepino, on the other hand, has juicy flesh that makes it resemble a melon. Their sizes, colors, and flavors may vary, but all of these plants belong to the same taxonomic group. In fact, they represent some of the species sequenced to produce a remarkable collection of related genomes—remarkable because it aims to span the entire Solanum genus.