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Tomato engineering hits the sweet spot to make big sugar-rich fruit

A genetic regulator of tomato sweetness has been identified through comparison of wild and domesticated varieties of the plant. Genetically engineering tomatoes to alter this gene increases sugar content without affecting fruit size.
  1. Amy Lanctot

    1. Amy Lanctot is in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology and Innovative Genomics Institute, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA; and at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley.

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  2. Patrick M. Shih

    1. Patrick M. Shih is in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology and Innovative Genomics Institute, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA; and at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley.

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Crop improvement is essential to produce nutritious plants and to feed a growing global population. But improvement strategies are often hindered by both metabolic and genetic trade-offs that arise because of genetic linkage — the close physical proximity on a chromosome of genes that control different desirable characteristics1. Genetic linkage makes it difficult to alter one gene without affecting the other. This is true for the key characteristics of fruit sweetness and size in tomato plants2, a crop that is grown worldwide. Writing in Nature, Zhang et al.3 report how they improved tomato sweetness without affecting fruit size by targeting a gene encoding a protein that drives the degradation of a sugar-producing enzyme.

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Nature 635, 559-560 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03302-8

References

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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