TECHNOLOGY FEATURE
27 April 2022
Correction 10 May 2022

Base edit your way to better crops

Plant scientists are turning to genome-editing techniques to precisely tailor the productivity and consumer appeal of important crops.

Michael Eisenstein⁰

Michael Eisenstein
1. Michael Eisenstein is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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Caixia Gao and a member of her research team inspect CRISPR-modified tomato crops in a greenhouse — Caixia Gao and a member of her team inspect CRISPR-modified tomato plants in a greenhouse at their growing facility in Beijing. Credit: Stefen Chow

Is there anything better than a perfectly sweet summer strawberry? Alas, many commercial berries look better than they taste. But molecular biologist Caixia Gao and her colleagues at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology in Beijing have devised a way to tune the sweetness of strawberries using a few simple genetic tweaks¹. “We could increase the total sugar content from 20 to 41 milligrams per gram,” she says. “And there are so many different levels, you could choose what you like.”

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Nature 604, 790-792 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01117-z

Updates & Corrections

Correction 10 May 2022: An earlier version of this Technology feature article erroneously implied that Pairwise’s leafy green vegetable was being base-edited to improve the nutritional content. In fact, the firm used standard CRISPR and targeted flavour. Also, the stoneless cherry is not yet in field testing.

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