Image Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture
Daniel Rodriguez Leal is making tomatoes more resilient by speeding up the selection process that plant breeders have used for thousands of years. With his help, and a bit of high-tech wizardry that involves turning the volume up or down on a plant’s own genes, growers may one day have a whole new suite of tomatoes that are resistant to common diseases that currently threaten their yields.
The gene-edited tomatoes he produces are not the same as GMO – or genetically modified organisms. He’s not adding genes from another plant. He’s merely tweaking the genes that are already there. It’s not unlike the way a breeder selects individual plants with certain characteristics and then breeds them over and over to “turn up” those characteristics. Leal finds the genes responsible for disease resistance, and then shortcuts all those breeding cycles by going straight into the genome of the plant and turning them up.
In his Tomato Lab@UMD, Leal is experimenting with multiple gene edits at once, trying to see if they can make very complex, yet very precise changes that produce the desired resiliencies without affecting the growth, shape, color and taste of the tomatoes.
Success would mean a welcome boon to the tomato market around the world, and it would have a big impact for Americans. The United States was the fourth largest[KC1] producer of tomatoes globally in 2022, and California alone supplies about 30% of [KC2] the world’s processing tomatoes, which are canned or used for sauce, juice and salsa. Growers spend considerable time, energy and money protecting their crops from the diseases Daniel is working on.
Watch the video below to hear more from Daniel.
