Sunshine vitamin, meet the world’s most popular fruit.
Tomatoes (yes, they’re technically a fruit, though the U.S. government considers them a vegetable for “nutritional and culinary purposes”) can be genetically-engineered to contain vitamin D, researchers recently reported in Nature Plants.
The modification could offer a new way to address vitamin D deficiency, a “global health problem” that affects about 1 billion people around the planet, they noted.
The gene-edited tomatoes could also create a plant-based source of the vitamin for vegetarians and vegans, whether eaten fresh, sun-dried or transformed into supplements.
“We are not only addressing a huge health problem, but are helping producers, because tomato leaves which currently go to waste, could be used to make supplements from the gene-edited lines,” said Cathie Martin, a corresponding author of the study and professor at the John Innes Centre in the UK, in a statement.
The option would provide a “leap forward in decreasing our dependence on animal-based foods,” researchers from the Laboratory of Functional Plant Biology at Ghent University in Belgium wrote in an accompanying commentary.
Would consumers accept gene-edited tomatoes?
Tomatoes are a popular crop: With 100 million tons produced around the world each year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, they’ve been called the world’s favorite fruit.
Here’s how the modification works: The building blocks of…
