Researchers at Tel Aviv University's School of Plant Sciences and Food Security have created a crop-specific gene editing method that successfully modifies key traits in tomato plants, including fruit flavor and shape. This innovative approach to plant genome editing could be applied to a wide variety of crop species, paving the way for the development of improved, high-yield, and better-tasting plant varieties in the future.
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Researchers at Tel Aviv University’s School of Plant Sciences and Food Security have developed a crop-specific gene editing method that alters key traits in tomato plants, including fruit taste and shape. They believe this breakthrough could be applied to a broad range of crop species and may help develop new, improved plant varieties in the future.
“We demonstrated that with our technology, it is possible to select specific traits and influence them, a capability that is essential for advancing agriculture and achieving food security,” the researchers stated.
The study was led by Prof. Eilon Shani, Prof. Itay Mayrose, and PhD student Amichai Berman from Tel Aviv University’s School of Plant Sciences and Food Security, in collaboration with PhD student Ning Su and Dr. Yuqin Zhang from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and Dr. Osnat Yanai of the Israeli agri-tech company NetaGenomiX. The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.
“Researchers around the world are engaged in advancing agriculture in order to address accelerated global changes and feed the global population in the coming decades,” Shani explains. “Among other things, genetic editing technologies are being advanced to develop new plant varieties with desirable traits such as resistance to drought, heat, and disease, improved flavor, optimized nutrient usage, and more. One such method is CRISPR-Cas9, which has revolutionized the field of genetic editing by enabling the precise modification of specific genes in the genome.”
In agricultural development, CRISPR technology has faced key challenges: limited capacity to edit and study multiple genes, and genetic redundancy in plants, where similar genes compensate for each other. This study overcomes these issues by improving CRISPR efficiency, allowing researchers to examine thousands of genes and better understand their functions, according to a press release.
Berman said that to overcome genetic redundancy, they aimed to simultaneously alter entire families of similar genes. “In a previous study, we developed a breakthrough solution to overcome the issue of genetic redundancy, a dedicated algorithm, and fed it a list of thousands of genes we wanted to edit. The algorithm identified a suitable CRISPR unit for each gene (or gene group) on the list that would induce the desired modification, thereby constructing CRISPR libraries. The first study achieved good results in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, and this time we sought to test the method in a crop plant for the first time. We chose the tomato.”
In this study, the researchers created 10 CRISPR libraries containing about 15,000 unique units, each designed to target a specific gene family in the tomato genome. These CRISPR units were used to edit approximately 1,300 tomato plants, with each plant altered in a different gene group. The team then monitored the plants to see how these edits affected traits such as fruit size, shape, taste, nutrient use, and disease resistance. Notably, several plant lines showed sweetness levels that were either higher or lower than those of the control group.
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