Genetic engineering for cooking

Scientists have learned how to get GM vegetables and fruits without seeds

Japanese biologists have used CRISPR technology to produce pitted tomatoes that do not need pollination.

Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science

Parthenocarpic (seedless) fruits are found in many cultivated plants – everyone knows grapes without seeds. However, as a rule, such forms were selected during breeding as the product of a random mutation that occurred over millennia of cultivation.

Scientists from Tokushima University in Japan managed to achieve the same in a matter of days with the help of targeted gene modification through the CRISPR/Cas9 system. In the article by Ueta et al. Rapid breeding of parthenocarpic tomato plants using CRISPR/Cas9, published in the journal Scientific Reports, they report obtaining parthenocarpic tomatoes. The target mutation was introduced into the SlIAA9 gene, which led to increased production of auxins, plant hormones that stimulate fruit growth without seed formation. Otherwise, the GM plants were no different from the usual ones, only the leaves (their growth is also controlled by auxins) had a less rugged shape.

On the left – ordinary tomatoes, on the right – parthenocarpic
(pictures from an article in Scientific Reports) – VM.

What is especially interesting is that such plants do not need pollination in order to produce excellent edible fruits. Theoretically, their widespread use in agriculture will significantly reduce the need for pollinating insects, which have recently been going through far from the best of times. Such plants will have to be propagated by "cuttings", which may require additional labor, but this task is quite possible to automate and robotize.

The authors note that before the advent of CRISPR/Cas9, several attempts had already been made to obtain parthenocarpic tomatoes using GM methods of the previous generation, but all these works were extremely resource- and time-consuming and insufficiently reliable. Whereas the new approach using CRISPR/Cas9 is characterized by the speed, simplicity and high accuracy of modification of the target gene.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  12.04.2017