We may have developed a new variety of tomatoes

Tomatoes, one of the favorable fruits in the world, have been domesticated by two teams in the world by utilizing the gene editing methods. This groundbreaking innovation which has been done less than three years suggested that the nutritional contents are higher than those we consume now.

The method of gene editing is popular with the abbreviation of CRISPR which lies to genome-editing technique. The approaching of this technique is not only about how we edit the gene, but also it can be used in improving another type of plants. One of the plants that has been experienced in gene editing technique is those which relatively resemble to tomato such as ground cherry.

Wild tomatoes, native to the Andes mountains in South America, produce pea-sized fruit. Over many generations, people altered the plant by picking mutants with desirable traits such as larger fruit. However, when a mutant is plucked from a larger population for breeding, genetic diversity is lost. And the desirable mutations sometimes come with unwanted traits. For example, the tomatoes harvested for supermarket aim have lost much of their taste and flavor.

This is why a good domestication needed to avoid the higher losing of taste and flavor. We also need fast-track domestication which could help us in supplying the healthier food due to the climate change and disease, leading us to devastating condition of crops. In order to do the domestication, biologists compared the genomes of food plants with their wild relatives and tried to understand the changes happened when the domestication is conducted. Their findings suggested them to reintroduce a new technique in editing six changes called FW2.2 within the tomatoes, and the findings are published in Nature Biotechnology Journals.