Crispr is breeding a sweet giant tomato

Crispr is breeding a sweet giant tomato

red tomatoes belong to the past: the growing of sweeter tomatoes is possible by only editing two genes of the fruit. Deleting this genes increased the content of glucose and fructose in the edited fruits by up to 30 % compared to mass-produced tomatoes, as from a study 1 emerged.

The gene processing tomatoes also have about the same weight as those currently offered and the plants produce as much fruit as the current varieties. These findings could not only help to improve tomatoes worldwide, but are also an important step to understand, How to produce and save fruits sugar , according to the authors.

Christophe Rothan, a fruit biologist at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research in Paris, which was not involved in the study, describes this study as "great and significant in its area and beyond". It opens up the "possibility of using the large genetic diversity that exists in wild types and partly in domesticated varieties to improve modern varieties," he says.

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worldwide are produced more than 186 million tons of tomatoes every year, which means that the fruit is one of the most valuable horticultural cultures in the world. Like other plants, tomato domesticated Preferred properties - such as the fruit size - were selected. Cultivated tomatoes are up to 100 times larger than their wild ancestors today, which contributes to increasing the amount of fruit that each plant produces.

But this great size has its price: the larger the fruit applies, the less the proportion of sugar, which are responsible for the classic taste of self -grown tomatoes. In contrast, supermarket tomatoes "like water", says Jinzhe Zhang, co-author of the study and plant geneticist at the Chinese Institute for Agricultural Sciences in Beijing. "They are tasteless."

To tackle this problem, compared Zhang and his colleagues the genomes of cultivated tomato varieties (Solanum Lycopersicum) with their sweeter wild relatives. They found the optimal area in two genes, each encoding a protein, the enzymes that are responsible for sugar production. With the help of the Crispr-Cas9 Gentechnology The researchers deactivated the two genes and found that the plants produced fruits that were far sweeter than that of one widespread variety.

The new tomato would not only be welcome because it would delight consumers, but also because it could save the time, energy and costs in the manufacture of other products such as tomato paste, in which water has to be removed from the fruit, says Ann Powell, a retired plant biochemist who previously worked at the University of California in Davis.

Since these genes also occur in a variety of plant species, the knowledge could also be important for other products, since the mechanisms on which the sugar production are based on fruits have long puzzled, according to Powell.

1. Zhang, J. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08186-2 (2024).

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