Page 7 - AWA Vol.41-No.3

EDUCATION IN AGRICULTURE

Scientists discover genes to grow bigger tomatoes and eggplants
ohns Hopkins scientists say the innova- The genetic duplicates, or paralogs, end-
Jtion could bring 'new fruits, foods, and ed up being important for determining
flavors' to an expanded global agricultural traits like flowering time, fruit size, and fruit
marketplace shapes. Turning off both copies of the CLV3
Bigger, tastier tomatoes and eggplants gene paralogs in the forest nightshade na-
could soon grace our dinner plates thanks tive to Australia, for example, resulted in
to Johns Hopkins scientists who have discov- plants that the researchers described as
ered genes that control how large the fruits "weird, bubbly, disorganized" shapes—not
will grow. viable to sell as produce in grocery stores.
But careful editing of just one copy of CLV3
The research—led by teams at Johns Hop- led to larger fruits.
kins University and Cold Spring Harbor "Having full genome sequences for these
Laboratory—could lead to the development Using computational analysis, the research- species is like having a new treasure map.
of new varieties of heirloom tomatoes and ers compared the genome maps and traced We can see where and when one genetic
eggplants, including those that help support how the genes evolved over time: more than path diverges from another and then ex-
agriculture in areas around the world where half, the researchers found, had been dupli- plore that place in the genetic information
local varieties are currently too small for cated at some point in the past. where we wouldn't have thought to look,"
large-scale production. "Over tens of millions of years, there's this said Katharine Jenike, who assembled the
"Once you've done the gene editing, all it constant churn of DNA sequences being genome sequences and was a PhD student
takes is one seed to start a revolution," said added and lost," Schatz said. "The same pro- in Schatz's lab at the time of the research.
co-lead author Michael Schatz, a geneticist cess can occur for gene sequences, where "They allowed us to find the size-genes in a
at Johns Hopkins University who worked on entire genes duplicate or disappear. When really unexpected place."
the Telomere-to-Telomere human genome we started looking, we noticed these chang- In the African eggplant, a species grown
project. "With the right approvals, we could es were very widespread, but we didn't yet across the African continent and in Brazil
mail an engineered seed to Africa or any- know what those changes meant for the for its edible fruits and leaves, the research-
where it's needed and open up entirely new plants." ers identified a gene, SaetSCPL25-like, that
agricultural markets. There's huge potential To find out, collaborators at the Boyce controls the number of seed cavities, or loc-
to translate these advances into real-world Thomson Institute used CRISPR-Cas9 gene- ules, inside the fruit. When they edited the
impact." editing technology to tweak one or both du- SaetSCPL25-like genes in the tomato plant,
The research is part of a larger effort to plicates of a gene, and collaborators at Cold the researchers found they could grow to-
map the complete genomes of 22 crops in Spring Harbor grew the engineered plants matoes with more locules: the more numer-
the nightshade genus, which includes toma- to see how the tweaks changed the mature ous the locules, the bigger the tomato.
toes, potatoes, and eggplants. plants. Circle 5 on enquiry card

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