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Vitamin D3 may be the “sunshine vitamin,” but what do you do when you can’t get outside much or if you live in the far north, where the sun can disappear for months?
Answer: you can drink gallons of milk—or you can eat a tomato genetically engineered by scientists at the John Innes Center, an independent plant-based research group in England, a country renowned for its gray days.
The biologists found a duplicated section of the tomato’s genome and used the Nobel-winning CRISPR gene-editing technology to modify it so it would produce the precursor of vitamin D3, which the tomato then converts to the real thing.
The edit allows a single tomato to amass about as much vitamin D3 as two medium-size chicken eggs or 28 grams of tuna, both of which are recommended as good dietary sources of the vitamin.
The technique also boosted the amount of D3 in tomato plants’ leaves, suggesting that they could be used to manufacture vitamin D3 supplements instead of being thrown on the compost pile. That could give commercial growers another revenue stream.
The modification didn’t have any detectable adverse effects on the plants’ or fruits’ growth cycle, size, or yield.
TRENDPOST: A billion people worldwide, including 40 percent of Europeans and a growing number of U.S. kids who spend playtime indoors eating junk food in front of video screens, suffer from D3 deficiency, the Innes center estimates.
Eggplants, peppers, and potatoes have the same genetic pathway as tomatoes, making them candidates to become D3-rich vitamin supplements as well.
The new work shows that, by rummaging in plants’ genomes to find idle or useless genes and strands of DNA, many more plants likely could be turned into nutrient factories.