Researchers Use CRISPR to Create Compact Tomato Plants

An international team of scientists has used the CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing technology to restructure vine-like tomato plants into extremely compact, early yielding plants suitable for urban agriculture and even space missions.

A gene-edited tomato plant. Image credit: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

The new gene-edited tomato plants look nothing like the long vines you might find growing in a backyard garden or in agricultural fields.

The most notable feature is their bunched, compact fruit. They resemble a bouquet whose roses have been replaced by ripe cherry tomatoes. They also mature quickly, producing ripe fruit that’s ready for harvest in about five weeks.

“The gene-edited tomato plants have a great small shape and size, they taste good, but of course that all depends on personal preference,” said Professor Zach Lippman, a researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Professor Lippman and his colleagues from the United States, Korea, Israel, and Germany created the new tomato plants by fine-tuning two genes that control the switch to reproductive growth and plant size, the SELF PRUNING (SP) and SP5G.

“When you’re playing with plant maturation, you’re playing with the whole system, and that system includes the sugars, where they’re made, which is the leaves, and how they’re distributed, which is to the fruits,” Professor Lippman said.

Searching for a third player, the researchers discovered a gene called SIER, which controls the lengths of stems.

Mutating SIER with the CRISPR gene-editing tool and combining it with the mutations in the other two flowering genes created shorter stems and extremely compact plants.

“The primary goal of this new research is to engineer a wider variety of crops that can be grown in urban environments or other places not suitable for plant growth,” Professor Lippman said.

The scientists refining their technique and hopes other scientists will be inspired to try it on other fruit crops like kiwi.

By making crops and harvests shorter, they believe that agriculture can reach new heights.

“I can tell you that NASA scientists have expressed some interest in our new tomatoes,” Professor Lippman said.

The team’s paper was published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

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C. Kwon et al. Rapid customization of Solanaceae fruit crops for urban agriculture. Nat Biotechnol, published online December 23, 2019; doi: 10.1038/s41587-019-0361-2