“Rotten tomatoes no more: growing sweeter tomatoes is possible by editing just two of the fruit’s genes. Deleting the genes increased the engineered fruits’ glucose and fructose levels by up to 30% over mass-produced tomatoes,” reports Nature:
Better yet, the gene-edited tomatoes weigh roughly the same as those sold now, and the plants produce as much fruit as do current varieties. These findings could not only help to improve tomatoes worldwide but are also an important step forward in understanding how fruits produce and store sugar…Like other crops, tomatoes have been domesticated by selecting for traits that reflect human preference — such as fruit size. Cultivated tomatoes today are up to 100 times larger than their wild ancestors…But this large size comes at a cost: typically, the bigger the fruit, the lower the proportion of the sugars that are responsible for the classic home-grown tomato taste.
The large tomatoes found in supermarkets are relatively flavorless and not very sweet. To address that lack of sweetness and flavor, researchers identified two genes in tomatoes that degrade enzymes involved in sugar production. Using CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing technology, researchers deactivated the two genes and discovered that the new tomato plants produced tomatoes that are much sweeter than a widely cultivated variety. The new plants will not only taste better to most consumers, but also could reduce the amount of time and money that goes processing tomatoes into tomato paste, which requires the removal of water from the tomatoes used to make the paste.
CRISPR is also helping treat severe auto-immune diseases, sending some people into remission “after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells,” reports Nature.
Gene therapy has also ended the years of excruciating pain suffered by a boy with sickle-cell disease. And it has restored vision in some people with inherited blindness.
An English toddler has had her hearing restored in a pioneering gene therapy trial: “Opal Sandy was born unable to hear anything due to auditory neuropathy, a condition that disrupts nerve impulses traveling from the inner ear to the brain and can be caused by a faulty gene. But after receiving an infusion containing a working copy of the gene during groundbreaking surgery that took just 16 minutes, the 18-month-old can hear almost perfectly and enjoys playing with toy drums.”
A genetically-modified chicken lays eggs that people allergic to eggs can eat. Scientists have genetically engineered a cow that produces human insulin in its milk.
Genetic engineering recently produced pork that people who are allergic to pork can eat.
