Enhancing tomato fruit sweetness by CRISPR/Cas9-mediated SlVIF gene editing.
An X, Tian W, Wang Y, Ren Y, Xu C
Crispr
PubMedIt could lead to naturally sweeter tomatoes in grocery stores and home gardens — no artificial flavoring, no selective breeding over decades, just a precise genetic tweak that lets the tomato do what it already wants to do.
Tomato plants have a built-in brake that limits how sweet their fruit gets by blocking the breakdown of one sugar into two sweeter ones. Researchers used a molecular scissors tool called CRISPR to snip out the gene responsible for that brake, allowing more of those sweeter sugars to accumulate in the fruit. The edited tomato plants passed this sweeter trait on to their offspring, and the final plants were free of any added foreign genetic material.
Key Findings
The CRISPR editing technique achieved a high efficiency rate of 47%, meaning nearly half of all treated plants carried the intended genetic change.
Knocking out the SlVIF gene increased the accumulation of fructose and glucose in tomato fruit by removing a natural inhibitor of sugar breakdown.
Two stable, Cas9-free tomato lines were successfully generated, meaning the gene-editing tool itself was not present in the final heritable plants — a key safety and regulatory consideration.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists used CRISPR gene editing to knock out a gene in tomatoes that normally suppresses sugar buildup, resulting in sweeter fruit with higher levels of fructose and glucose. The technique was highly efficient and produced stable, heritable changes without leaving foreign DNA in the final plants.
Abstract Preview
In tomato plants, vacuolar invertase inhibitor (VIF) is a negative regulator of sucrose (SUC) degradation into fructose (FRU) and glucose (GLU), suggesting knockout of SlVIF promotes the accumulati...
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The tomato is a plant whose fruit is an edible berry that is eaten as a vegetable. The tomato is a member of the nightshade family that includes tobacco, potato, and chili peppers. It originated from western South America, and may have been domesticated there, in Mexico, or in Central America. Th...