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Regulation of plants developed through new breeding techniques must ensure societal benefits

Nature Plants volume 9, pages 679–684 (2023)Cite this article

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Genome editing provides a unique opportunity to create produce benefiting consumers, but success depends on risk-proportional regulation. Existing seedless fruit varieties such as watermelon, mandarin oranges and grape are strongly preferred by consumers and support healthy diets without pre-market regulatory approvals required for commercialization. Replicating the seedless trait in other fruits is a promising way to increase consumption. Here we compare the differential treatment by various regulatory systems of identical products made by inserting an ancient seedless allele into muscadine grape (Vitis rotundifolia) using traditional breeding or templated or non-templated genome editing tools.

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Fig. 1: Multiple paths to the sdi allele.
Fig. 2: Varying utility of current regulatory approaches.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pairwise Plants Services, Inc., Durham, NC, USA

    Daniel Jenkins, Nicole Juba, Brian Crawford & Aaron Hummel

  2. Department of Horticulture, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA

    Margaret Worthington

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  1. Daniel Jenkins
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  2. Nicole Juba
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  3. Brian Crawford
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  4. Margaret Worthington
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  5. Aaron Hummel
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Daniel Jenkins, Nicole Juba, Brian Crawford, Margaret Worthington or Aaron Hummel.

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Competing interests

D.J., N.J., B.C. and A.H. are employees of Pairwise Plants Services, Inc. which is involved in the development of genome-editing tools and edited plants.

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Jenkins, D., Juba, N., Crawford, B. et al. Regulation of plants developed through new breeding techniques must ensure societal benefits. Nat. Plants 9, 679–684 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-023-01403-2

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