Super-tomato shows what plant scientists can do

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06915-y

by okket • 8 years ago

46 63 8 years ago

John_KZ• 8 years ago

Europe’s outdated approach to gene editing.

Right, I can't wait to follow the latest trends on gene editing. Our approach is so old and boring, we should be trying the new fun and shiny stuff, like having some guy edit the genes of our staple foods while providing no guarantees whatsoever.

For those who aren't aware what this is article is about, it's about US farming lobbies being unable to export their genetically modified food crops to the EU.

While GMOs can be exported to Europe, they must pass through a careful set of tests by the EFSA (european food safety authority), including appropriate labeling, and the various EU countries can still choose to ban them under their authority.

As Trump said recently, he will be pushing the EU to accept all of the untested GMO crops his sponsors grow, and he'll probably be pushing for a forced, EU-wide directive to just take everything and shut up.

pawelmurias• 8 years ago

staple foods

Loads of the commercial tomato variants are easy to transport and taste nothing like a proper tomato. It's travesty they share the name. It's a far stretch to even call them food. I'll take ones modified to be edible every day.

cleansy• 8 years ago

As Trump said recently, he will be pushing the EU to accept all of the untested GMO crops his sponsors grow, and he'll probably be pushing for a forced, EU-wide directive to just take everything and shut up.

The EU was so far very protective, even imperialistic about its own farming industry. The chances of that scenario happening, especially from a internationally laughed-at politician like Trump, are very low IMHO.

craigsmansion2• 8 years ago

Very much so.

Beneficial genetic modifications will unfortunately always be pushed to create more lax laws and legal backdoors for modifications that are profit oriented.

As things are, the main modification of interest to the industries pushing for GM crops is herbicide and insecticide resistance (preferably of a particular patented brand). That is, just spray until everything but your tomatoes die.

As far as the article goes: if you want tasty tomatoes, try small scale organic crops, maybe even locally grown. Yes, they are more expensive. That's because they require more work.

Allowing for GM foods will not give you super tasty tomatoes at the price of cheap watery ones, even though that's the promise towards consumers. It's a racket for growing bad tomatoes even cheaper.

maxerickson2• 8 years ago

Gene suppression using CRISPR is less aggressive than some "traditional" techniques that aren't heavily regulated, like irradiating seeds and seeing what sorts of mutations that produces.

So banning CRISPR and not going back and making sure you aren't using any fruit of irradiated seeds is sort of incoherent.

tomp8• 8 years ago

How would you allow CRISPR just for gene suppression? It's a slippery slope, that's a problem. Soon, you get Roundup.

yorwba• 8 years ago

Yeah, the problem with the EU regulations for GMOs isn't that they impose food safety requirements, but that they apply differently to targeted vs. untargeted genetic modifications.

Part of that is inertia, since humans have been using selective breeding to accumulate beneficial mutations for millennia, and they only rarely mess up and turn plants that were safe to eat into unsafe ones [1]. Because of that, conventional breeders don't see the point in doing strict tests they haven't been doing before.

But in the end, that different treatment just leads to attempts at making large genomic changes without having to report them as genetic modification (e.g. using radiation to induce mutations) that are probably less safe than relatively targeted methods like CRISPR.

[1] the best-known example is probably the Lenape potato https://boingboing.net/2013/03/25/the-case-of-the-poison-pot...

milansm• 8 years ago

Noob here. Doesn't targeted genetic mutation have an additional step of recognizing the exact gene (or combination of genes or gene properties, whatever the terminology is) that is needed to be changed in order for the desired outcome to take place? If so, isn't all that fuss about GMO exactly about that additional step with several open questions like: 1. we cannot be sure that the gene we're editing is the one that is responsible for the feature we want (or that it is responsible only for that feature) 2. What are the chances of editing the wrong gene and noticing it? 3. What happens is we edit the wrong gene without noticing it?

Gatsky4• 8 years ago

I don’t buy this. It is 100% guaranteed that these GMO tomatoes are safer than alcohol and tobacco. Yet the ‘old and boring’ approach has deemed these clearly poisonous substances safe, and allows billion dollar industries to exist selling them. This is totally illogical.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 8 years ago

alcohol and tobacco. Yet the ‘old and boring’ approach has deemed these clearly poisonous substances safe

It has not deemed them safe - They are "grandfathered" in. There is absolutely no way that you could introduce tobacco as a new product today.

tomp8• 8 years ago

What's the proof?

The article says:

a cupboard full of genes with known effects, that can each be adjusted to turn an unruly wild plant into a valuable domesticated one

which I don't believe at all - if we really knew exactly what genes do, we could construct new life-forms artificially. But we don't biology is far too complicated for us (for the time being). We don't even understand climate (even the best models consistently overstated the predicted temperature rise).

tomp8• 8 years ago

I completely support GMOs. As long as they're labeled. Let the consumers decide (also, food labelling is terrible in general - in many countries, you can say "no trans fats" for food that actually has trans fats).

evgen3• 8 years ago

Try to name a single food you consume that has not been genetically modified. _Everything_ has been modified for thousands of years. What is different now is that we do not need to rely on random chance and dumb luck to get a good mutation and that we can introduce sequences that were not originally in the original genome. Let's let consumers decide and be completely honest with them. Those 'organic' oranges and grapefruit you are buying? Genetically modified. That bread in your basket? Unless it is einkorn wheat then it is genetically modified.

tomp8• 8 years ago

Where I see really a lot potential for genetically-modified food, is in space. There, the constraints are completely different, so it can be extremely beneficial to be able to design your crops as you wish - control water usage, respiration, growth patterns, flowering patterns, number and size of fruits, etc.

Another thing I was thinking about - not related to GMO, but I'll throw it out in case anyone from HN knows more about it - would it be possible to control plants using hormones? E.g. to manually "order" the plant to stop growing leaves and start growing fruits, or to grow in a particular direction (this could probably be done with light as well) or pattern, etc.

niciliketo• 8 years ago

I personally think that improvements to the nutritional value of the product would be of great interest. It is mentioned in the article but I didn't see any metrics.

crististm7• 8 years ago

How do you know there are only extreme benefits?

To your second question I need to ask something: after you moved past the coolness factor, what do you think would be the _drawbacks_?

tomp8• 8 years ago

I'm not saying there would be only benefits, I'm just saying that the tradeoffs are different... Earth-food works, so GMO can either marginally improve it, make it marginally worse, or make it really worse (i.e. it's the tail risk I'm worried about, same as with climate change). Space food is currently impossible, so almost anything we do will be neutral or an improvement. Also, as I mentioned, the constraints are completely different - up-front costs are mostly irrelevant, mass and speed of growth are the problem - so foods that are net negative on Earth (e.g. because they have to be produced in a lab and are hugely expensive) might be viable in space.

moltar• 8 years ago

Finally. I think many people in the west have never tasted a real tomatoe. They’ll think it’s a completely new breed ))

dsr_• 8 years ago

There are lots of heirloom tomato cultivars -- but they don't travel well, and frequently look strange. They tend to be sold directly by farmers at slightly premium prices.

In the last few years there has been commercial success with "new" varieties of cherry-sized tomatoes, which carry a lot of flavor, are pretty, and travel quite well.

buboard2• 8 years ago

the European Court of Justice has way too much power over way too many things.

yostrovs• 8 years ago

Are hearings for new judges contentious?

buboard2• 8 years ago

there are no hearings, so they are not contentious

YeGoblynQueenne3• 8 years ago

Yes, well, I'm extremely suspicious of the "better tasting" claim in the article- and the use of the over-the-top terminology is not doing much to reassure me ("super" tomatoes! Rrriiight).

To begin with, there is no need to edit wild varieties to produce tasty tomatoes. The varities we have already are actually pretty damn good already. It's the production and distribution methods that suck out all the taste and purpose out of their miserable, sour existence.

For example, when I'm back home in Greece for the summer, I eat tomatoes that taste of tomato and smell of tomato. They are usually grown by people, normally grocers, in their gardens, in small numbers (though not necessarily using organic means, if you were wondering). The grocers who grow them then sell them in their stores, so you can find maybe a kilo of home-grown fruit in a grocery store every other week or so, and often only in the summer (because the grocers seldom have greenhouses). Note that this is only true in the countryside- in the cities, like Athens, the quality is much more bland.

Like in Athens, the tomatoes I eat in the UK, where I live and work, are boring, tasteless and miserable and they leave behind a lingering sensation of disappointment and nostalgia of a faraway sunny land. As I understand it, these commercial varieties are actually grown in Southern Europe (including Greece) in vast greenhouses, from where they are picked when they're still green and then allowed to "mature" (basically, slowly they rot) during transportation in fridge trucks. These tomatoes have been abused to the point of PTSD and it shows when you put them in your mouth: they are empty and devoid of all taste, fragrance and meaning and can drive a sane eater to depression.

So forget about mass-producing and mass-distributing decent-tasting tomatoes. You can mass-produce tomatoes that satisfy the farmers, with characteristics that make them profitable to sell; and you can mass-produce tomatoes that the majority of consumers will accept, mournfully, but only because they seldom have the chance to buy and eat good ones, and have probably even forgotten what tomatoes actualy taste like.

But you can't mass-produce good tomatoes.

crististm7• 8 years ago

Unfortunately, you can say this until you are blue in the face and those who should listen will turn a deaf ear. You can drown them in good tomatoes and they will not see them to save their lives.

petters• 8 years ago

But you can't mass-produce good tomatoes.

I thought the whole point of this article was that you can, with gene editing.

YeGoblynQueenne3• 8 years ago

My point is that gene-editing may breed "super", "awesome", "badass" tomatoes, but it can't breed tomatoes you really want to eat. So I doubt the article's premise very much.

Basically, my intuition is that you can't take a shortcut around the long time that it takes to develop good, tasty foodstuffs. For example, you can't hurry the production of good wine, you can't make olives mature overnight, or grow healthy animals in a day and you can't produce good varieties of vegetables in a few months of experiments. It takes literally generations of trial-and-error to get things right. And any effort to cheat time and speed-up processes ends up producing inferior products. This has always been the case, regardless of the technology- and the more recent advances, like CRISPR, only promise to speed things up, which is exactly what has steadily, constantly, failed until now with all the earlier technology that also promised to speed things up, only less so.

This is my intuition, anyway. I've eaten plenty of fast-food, mass-produced and cheap. I'm probably 50% pizza, 30% souvlaki and 10% burgers. But I know the difference between all that crap and the 20% that is my grandmothers' cooking (which was divine) and the local produce I eat every summer, when I go to the countryside. There is just no comparison between the crap that we eat out of convenience and the stuff that people eat when they have the time to grow it and cook it at leisure.

That must have something to do with the fact that figuring out what really tastes good is bloody hard, because taste (and fragrance) are such difficult senses to quantify. So even if science promises to make tomatoes feel tastier- well, the only measure of that is our own taste buds. And those cannot be relied upon, except over a very long timeframe, like generations- over generations, people choose the best varieties of grape that make the best wine; over generations, they pick the best varieties of fruit that have the most taste; the best vegetables, and so on. We won't succeed in reproducing that in a couple of years, no matter how much we science the shit out of it.

sp3322• 8 years ago

Your comment kinda highlights the point of the exercise. Attempts to breed shelf-stable varieties have accidentally bred out a lot of the flavor. But an analysis of the genes involved shows that these qualities are not inextricably linked. With the right tools, you can make tomatoes physically tough enough to ship well without sacrificing that tomato taste.

crististm7• 8 years ago

How do you know this?

sametmax2• 8 years ago

You can't make void taste good. The problem of the tomatoes is not their genetic material but the fact their environnement is empty of the things that make them good.

You can create the most badass tomatoes you want, they can't create things out of thin air.

craigsmansion2• 8 years ago

I guess it really takes someone originating from a genuine food culture to drive the emotion home ("tasteless and miserable and they leave behind a lingering sensation of disappointment and nostalgia of a faraway sunny land", wonderful), especially on a technically oriented board.

Genetic tech is exciting, but tasty tomatoes are a solved problem: just pay extra for time and dedication and demand quality. And just as with software there are likely no magic bullets to solve the 2 out of 3 of cheap-fast-good problem without significant side effects.

YeGoblynQueenne3• 8 years ago

Heh. Sorry to disappoint you, but like all kids growing up in Southern Europe, in recent years, the proportion of my diet that was Mediterrannean was unfortunately, small. The rest was pasta, chips, steaks, burgers, pizzas, and altogether too much salt and sugar. This is typical- Greece has now the highest rate of child obesity in the EU, and our once healthy, and tasty, diets, have been largely replaced by a predominance of red meat, pasta, rice and potatoes.

Thankfully, in between eating all that crap, I was also lucky to have two grandmothers that cooked traditionaly dishes with great skill, and to escape to the countryside every summer, where the local produce was incomparably better than whatever I could by in the big city. So at the very least, I know what we have lost :/

sametmax2• 8 years ago

I have the same view, espacially moving from France to the US.

But it also affect the nutriotional content : the same quantity of food won't satisfy my needs in the US.

Combining those 2 issues, you understant a lot of the health problem we face.

I can't blame kids for choosing the ice cream pot when the damn apple taste like garbage, hurt your teeth and doesn't provide you with thz feeling of eating something you need.

kwhitefoot• 8 years ago

Thousands of years of breeding have produced a fruit that often suits farmers and sellers more than consumers.

Tomatoes were only brought to Europe a few hundred years ago. I very much doubt that there was much serious breeding before that.

And there are loads that taste good, the supermarkets simply won't stock them because they make less money.

jessriedel• 8 years ago

I don't understand. Domestication is defined by the significant genetic changes induced by selective breeding. It's been practiced around the world, long before the industrial and scientific revolutions. For instance, pre-Colombian maize looks dramatically different than it's wild ancestor due to thousands of years of selective breeding.

specializeded• 8 years ago

You’d be very much wrong about that, though development certainly seems to have accelerated once it was taken to Europe.

JoeAltmaier• 8 years ago

They don't stock them, because growers don't plant them, because they don't transport or store well. More sugar means rots faster. Also, there's an enzyme(?) that forms just as the fruit ripens and gets tasty, that lets the skin split. So they pick them green, before either of those things happen.

There was a gene added that stopped the skin-split effect, so you could let them ripen and still transport them, but anti-GMO folk won't let us have them?

crististm7• 8 years ago

I don't know anymore if Idiocracy is a movie or not. It's like I'm living a bad dream where common sense is at a premium.

coldtea4• 8 years ago

Take for example the above content-less comment, which is all about signaling superiority (but doesn't even bother to explain why).

crististm7• 8 years ago

On one level I'm experimenting with different type of inflammatory comments to see how people respond. However, if you've seen the movie, you know that my comment is not void.

On another level, I really think that subject at matter (genetically modifications) is such that its full implications are impossible to correctly predict on any scale you consider. Thus, it would be _wise_ for everyone to play it safe and consider the fact that we are ignorant and don't know everything.

Unfortunately people act like they do know everything and they also know the future a million years from now. It's pointless to tell them that they are willfully blind to any opposition so one recourse is caricature and irony.

Once in a while you'll stumble onto someone who asks you, how dare you tell me that I'm stupid? Well, if you say you know everything, you are. They might even get the point.

At least I'm stupid enough to know that I don't know everything.

coldtea4• 8 years ago

Thousands of years of breeding have produced a fruit that often suits farmers and sellers more than consumers

Actually it's the opposite.

Modern breeding and other technical alterations has reduced tomatoes to a BS fruit that suits farmers and sellers (longer lasting, more colorful, more resistant, bigger) than consumers.

Tomatoes have lost a large percentage of their sugar content and flavor in the last 60 or so years for commercial reasons:

(...) the researchers also wanted to determine why store-bought tomatoes are so tasteless — i.e., "water bombs." It turns out that modern tomato cultivars are selected for qualities such as size, because consumers prefer large fruit, and firmness, because that trait makes tomatoes easier to ship, the researchers said. Meanwhile, the quality of flavor has been overlooked, the investigators said. We found that modern commercial varieties contain significantly lower amounts of many of these important flavor chemicals than older varieties [do]," the researchers said in the study.

https://www.livescience.com/57647-why-store-tomatoes-are-tas...

secure• 8 years ago

>Thousands of years of breeding have produced a fruit that often suits farmers and sellers more than consumers
Actually it's the opposite.
Modern breeding and other technical alterations has reduced tomatoes to a BS fruit that suits farmers and sellers (longer lasting, more colorful, more resistant, bigger) than consumers.

You’re saying the same thing as the article. Did you misread? :)

deialtrous2• 8 years ago

No he isn't. Breeding for crappy tomatoes has only gone on since the 1940s, not for thousands of years. The thousands of years of breeding was for good tomatoes, and the last 70 years or so has been ruining that thousands of years of work.

coldtea4• 8 years ago

"Modern breeding" vs "Thousands of years of breeding". Tomatoes were just fine in 1950 or so (and in many countries up to the 70s or so).

acomjean2• 8 years ago

There was a really good article awhile ago about gm potatoes that produced there own Pesticides.

The author grows some (there is a end user agreement that software people should be familiar with)

The trouble was figuring out who would regulate these new crops (in the US anyway). In the end McDonald’s wouldn’t buy them so I think that potatoe is gone. It’s a long read but it talks about how modern farming vs organic and a whole host of issues that are still relevant today .

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-t...

Super-tomato shows what plant scientists can do

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