The domestication of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) has led to a massive increase in fruit size but at the cost of decreased sugar levels, a negative correlation that is probably the consequence of a loss of high-sugar alleles. In a study published in Nature, Zhang et al. engineer a sweet tomato that maintains its high yield and weight by mutating a gene that encodes a protein that regulates sugar accumulation.
Zhang et al. performed a genome-wide association study of both wild and cultivated tomato species to search for genomic regions that are associated with fruit sweetness….ย The authors showed that CRISPRโCas9-mediated double knockout of SlCDPK27 and SlCDPK26 increases the sugar content of a commonly cultivated tomato variety by up to 30% without affecting fruit size.
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