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Gene editing could create spicy tomatoes, say researchers
Spicy tomatoes could soon be on the menu thanks to the rise of genome-editing technology, say researchers. It is not the first time experts have claimed the techniques could help to precisely and rapidly develop fruits and vegetables with unusual traits: scientists have already been looking at changing the colour of kiwi fruits and tweaking the taste of strawberries.
But researchers in Brazil and Ireland say such methods also could offer practical advantages, with spicy tomatoes offering a way of harvesting capsaicinoids, the pungent chemicals found in chilli peppers.
[...] Tomatoes and chilli peppers developed from a common ancestor but diverged about 19m years ago. "All the genes to produce capsaicinoids exist in the tomato, they are just not active," Zsögön said.
Capsaicinoids: Pungency beyond Capsicum (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.tplants.2018.11.001) (DX)
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday January 08 2019, @05:40PM (1 child)
The problem is that the error rate is currently too high. There's also the problem of ignorance and secondary effects, but mutations have that problem even worse.
Still...getting rid of, say, muscular dystrophy, would be highly defensible...and the normal form of the gene is known. So in that kind of case the only problem is the error rate.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 08 2019, @06:19PM
It will probably be impossible to reach a consistent zero write errors, but maybe synthetically created embryos will one day have less write errors than naturally created embryos. And then we'll have to ban impregnation by sexual intercourse. :-)
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