Scientists Are Using Gene Editing To Create the Perfect Tomato For Your Salad (qz.com)

An anonymous reader shares an article: Geneticists are now using technology to isolate the precise genes responsible for excessive branching and flowering, characteristics which lead to less fruit and thus less yield for farmers. In a study published in the journal Cell last week, geneticist Zachary Lippman of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory explains his research team's efforts to fix mutated tomatoes using CRISPR gene editing technology. By identifying the genes associated with undesired mutations, Lippman was able to edit them and suppress their effects. After playing with the plant architecture, Lippman's team was ultimately able to engineer highly productive plants that yielded more of the desired fruit and less of the unwanted flowers and branches. Original research paper; further reading on Nature magazine.

Comments

Perfect Tomato?

[hired killer]

So, the perfect tomato for volume production is also the perfect tomato for your salad? I suppose that might be true accidentally.

Re:Perfect Tomato?

[phantomfive]

Yeah, I was hoping to read how they created the most delicious tomato possible. I guess that's harder than just increasing yields.

Re:Perfect Tomato?

[mishehu]

I've rarely tasted a tomato in this country that gave me a wow. Almost all the time they taste like plastic. The exception is home grown tomatoes. So this is just another attempt to increase yields and to hell with concerns over flavor.

Re:Perfect Tomato?

[hey!]

Supermarket tomatoes are largely descended from a mutant discovered in the 1920s which ripened to a uniform red instead of with splotches of green. This produced a very attractive tomato, but with a drawback: it crippled the fruit's photosynthetic capability, resulting in a blander tomato.

Add to this the fact that tomatoes are picked green for ease of shipping and then artificially "ripened" by exposure to ethylene. Ethylene triggers the softening of the tomato and the development of the red carotenoid pigments, but because the tomato has no source of energy the taste doesn't change very much.

Now the changes mentioned in the article are neither here nor there from the point of view of taste. Anyone who's grown tomatoes knows you want to prune late season growth and flowers, so the vine puts the energy into the fruits your going to harvest rather than making lots of useless half-grown fruit. This should, all things being equal, produce better fruit, but it will still have the taste of a Styrofoam ball if you pick it green.

Re:Perfect Tomato?

[bigfinger76]

they are indistinguishable from what you might obtain from your garden in the late summer

No, they're not.

Re:Perfect Tomato?

[HornWumpus]

AC doesn't garden...obviously.

Re:Perfect Tomato?

[HornWumpus]

Commercial tomatoes are no better in Europe. In both places, the only ripe commercial tomatoes are in cans or roadside stands.

Re:Perfect Tomato?

[Jzanu]

This is the perfect tomato for human health. This research extends to tomatoes the same concept Norman Borlaug used to optimize the production of wheat and rice in the 60s. You know, the Green Revolution that legitimately kept the world from starving itself to death and decreased warfare. There are major health benefits from consuming tomatoes in any form, and this research increases production and descreases costs in a way that will increase tomato availability.

Re:Perfect Tomato?

[mnemotronic]

Yeah, I was hoping to read how they created the most delicious tomato possible. I guess that's harder than just increasing yields.

Efficient mass production, not flavor and nutritional content, are the goals of this research. The focus is more tomatoes per acre and higher yields on the grocer's shelf. Obviously the resulting tomato replica has to look like a tomato, act like a tomato, taste kinda like a tomato and be more-or-less non-toxic. If it fails the last 2 criteria we'll see if marketing spin it. The tomato, like the consumer, is a product to be manipulated for the profitability of the corporation.

Re:Perfect Tomato?

[bluefoxlucid]

Tomatoes are harvested green and shipped. They don't develop the sugars that make them sweet because they're not ripened on the vine. Were they vine-ripened, shipping them to remote states would land you with rotting tomatoes.

In practice, tomato flavor is related to the distance shipped from the harvesting operation. The logistics to get tomatoes to your table with less time between picking and purchasing are responsible for providing better flavor.

Re:Perfect Tomato?

[HornWumpus]

Even if you live in one of the largest tomato producing regions, the ones in the grocery store are still harvested underripe. The ripe ones go to sauce.

You'd think they could send ripe fruit to the stores right around the corner while it was in season, but they don't.

In northern CA, before the giant cannery outside Davis closed, the tomatoes on the side of the highway (lost in transport to the cannery) were better than those in the stores.

Re:Perfect Tomato?

[reboot246]

No, no, no! Put the tomatoes in a paper bag on your countertop and keep them out of the heat and sun. And never, ever put one in a refrigerator.

There's no way a commercially grown tomato can taste as good as a home-grown heirloom variety. Taste has been thrown out the door in favor of firmness and easier picking. Commercial tomatoes are tough-skinned to be able to stand the picking, handling, and shipping without turning to mush before you buy them. If you don't want to grow your own, then buy from local growers at the farmer's market.

Until you've had a REAL vine-ripened HEIRLOOM tomato, you don't know what a tomato is supposed to taste like. Heirloom (open-pollinated non-hybrid) are the best you can get, plus you can save the seeds to plant next year.

I grew up growing tomatoes and have raised thousands of them over the past 50 years. I know of what I speak.

Re:Perfect Tomato?

[hcs_$reboot]

Obviously the perfect tomato that gives the perfect amount of profit.

I see what you did there...

[Billy the Mountain]

Perfect, CRISPR for the crisper!

Re:Remind me again...

[mi]

Is this the part where Monsanto steps in to sodomize every poor person in the region

It does not appear, that Monsanto has anything to do with this particular research. Maybe, they will buy the relevant patents later.

In any case, if you make money using somebody else's intellectual property without their permission, you better spend some of it on Vaseline, yes...

flavor?

[PhantomHarlock]

I'm more interested in work being done to bring back flavor in tomatoes, which for some time now have been selected for looks rather than taste.

Re:flavor?

[drew_kime]

They already found it. Grocery stores don't care.

Recently, an industrial grower told Klee what he sees as the Garden Gem’s flaw: It’s a bit small—about 50 grams. (Some very large tomatoes reach a weight of 250 grams.) A small tomato entails incrementally higher labor costs, because it requires a few more plucks per pound.

Tomato growers are open to growing better-tasting varieties in principle, but only if they get paid more for it. Supermarkets, on the other hand, insist that shoppers only care about price. And can you blame them? After decades of eating tomatoes that taste like wet paper towels, no one thinks tomatoes are worth much.

I saw this movie

[rsilvergun]

It did not end well. Blood, ketchup everywhere...

An example of a bad title

[UnknowingFool]

The title of the paper is: "Bypassing Negative Epistasis on Yield in Tomato Imposed by a Domestication Gene"
The title of the Nature article is: "Fixing the tomato: CRISPR edits correct plant-breeding snafu".

Contrary to what the titles says, scientists are not "perfecting" the tomato in that they are trying to correct for a combination of two mutations by using CRISPR. The mutations are present because of a previous attempt at cross-breeding a wild tomato species with a commercial one.

Re:Remind me again...

[skoskav]

The stories about Monsanto suing innocent farmers are myths or more complicated than some narratives portray them. Popular Monsanto myths have been debunked over and over, yet they keep being brought up:

http://theness.com/neurologica...
http://www.npr.org/sections/th...
https://geneticliteracyproject...
https://skeptics.stackexchange...

I would at least recommend an excerpt from The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast about Monsanto myths:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Just say NO

[ArmoredDragon]

Why? GMO has been saving lives for decades now. Literally, many people would die without it. And I'm not just talking about starvation, I'm also talking about diabetic patients.

Re:Sunlight

[coolmoe2]

if its good enough for oil covered baby ducks its good enough for your tomatoes. :P

Seriously a light concentration of dish soap will help you wash away aphids nicely without any toxic residue.

I would be more worried about monocultures

[TomR teh Pirate]

There are interesting things that genes do besides what you think you're doing. For example, the famous Russian experiments to breed aggression towards humans out of captive foxes over several generations has had the curious side effect of the foxs' progeny having more dog-like physical characteristics such as floppy ears and less bushy tails. One looks at tomato plants, thinks about their evolutionary imperative to spread their own genes through fruit creation, and still those plants engage in "excessive" branching. There may an evolutionary reason for this that possibly has nothing to do with spreading fruit and instead makes the plant more resistant to disease, for example. The branching is perhaps just a side effect of disease tolerance. This isn't to say that I'm nervous about this, but when monoculture crops are established you also run other kinds of agricultural risks. The Cavendish banana is apparently in serious trouble due to its inability to resist fungal infections.

Buyer Beware

[JimSadler]

We already have some very poor tomatoes due to genetic alteration. They may do many things but they don't eat well. Apples are now a disaster. I haven't had a decent apple in years. Some are almost like biting into wood. Few have decent flavor. It is now at the point that I don't buy apples as they simply are great looking but lousy eating. The trouble seems to be that the crops are altered to suit production but not altered to enhance enjoyment. Go in a grocery store and try to find a really tart apple. Good luck.

Commercial tomatoes

[Archfeld]

Commercial tomatoes are crap in general. Hard as a rock, tasteless, and generally mealy textured fruits. The only good tomato is a home grown one, and they do grow well in a wide variety of climates in hundreds of breeds. I live in Yuma Arizona and it is hot as hell here and I can still grow tomatoes almost year round.

Re:Coldharbour?

[sodul]

I don't usually grow tomato plants myself but it is a common practice for tomato growers to trim the plants to reduce the number of branches and flowers so that more energy will go toward less fruits that will be stronger, bigger and more flavorful than if the plan had been left alone. I guess here the gene selection is to create a better balance between the number of total flowers and the marketable quality of the fruits.

Re:Just say NO

[MrL0G1C]

to GMO.
Rawr! Science BAD!

Rawr! ALL science good.... Is what the GM supporters want us to believe which of course isn't true and GM supporters like to ignore the multiple downsides of rapidly mutating nature in a haphazard manner.