“The First Crispr-Edited Salad Is Here: A Startup Used Gene Editing to Make Mustard Greens More Appetizing to Consumers. Next Up: Fruits”, 2023-05-16 ():
A gene-editing startup wants to help you eat healthier salads. This month, North Carolina-based Pairwise is rolling out a new type of mustard greens engineered to be less bitter than the original plant. The vegetable is the first Crispr-edited food to hit the US market.
Mustard greens are packed with vitamins and minerals but have a strong peppery flavor when eaten raw. To make them more palatable, they’re usually cooked. Pairwise wanted to retain the health benefits of mustard greens but make them tastier to the average shopper, so scientists at the company used the DNA-editing tool Crispr to remove a gene responsible for their pungency. The company hopes consumers will opt for its greens over less nutritious ones like iceberg and butter lettuce.
“We basically created a new category of salad”, says Tom Adams, cofounder and CEO of Pairwise. The greens will initially be available in select restaurants and other outlets in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, St. Louis, and Springfield, Massachusetts. The company plans to start stocking the greens in grocery stores this summer, likely in the Pacific Northwest first.
…Beyond mustard greens, the company is also trying to improve fruits. It’s using Crispr to develop seedless blackberries and pitless cherries.
…Technically, the new mustard greens aren’t a genetically modified organism, or GMO. In agriculture, GMOs are those made by adding genetic material from a completely different species. These are crops that could not be produced through conventional selective breeding—that is, choosing parent plants with certain characteristics to produce offspring with more desirable traits.
Instead, Crispr involves tweaking an organism’s own genes; no foreign DNA is added. One benefit of Crispr is that it can achieve new plant varieties in a fraction of the time it takes to produce a new one through traditional breeding. It took Pairwise just 4 years to bring its mustard greens to the market; it can take a decade or longer to bring out desired characteristics through the centuries-old practice of crossbreeding.
In the US, gene-edited foods aren’t subject to the same regulations as GMOs, so long as their genetic changes could have otherwise occurred through traditional breeding—such as a simple gene deletion or swapping of some DNA letters. As a result, gene-edited foods don’t have to be labeled as such. By contrast, GMOs need to be labeled as “bioengineered” or “derived from bioengineering” under new federal requirements, which went into effect at the beginning of 2022.
The US Department of Agriculture reviews applications for gene-edited foods to determine whether these altered plants could become a pest, and the Food and Drug Administration recommends that producers consult with the agency before bringing these new foods to market. In 2020, the USDA determined Pairwise’s mustard greens were not plant pests. The company also met with the FDA prior to introducing its new greens.
The mustard greens aren’t the first Crispr food to be launched commercially. In 2021, a Tokyo firm introduced a Crispr-edited tomato in Japan that contains high amounts of y-aminobutyric acid, or GABA. A chemical messenger in the brain, GABA blocks impulses between nerve cells. The company behind the tomato, Sanatech Seeds, claims that eating GABA can help relieve stress and lower blood pressure.
Scientists are using Crispr in an attempt to improve other crops, such as boosting the number of kernels on ears of corn or breeding cacao trees with enhanced resistance to disease. And last year, the US approved Crispr-edited cattle for use in meat production. Minnesota company Acceligen used the gene-editing tool to give cows a short, slick-hair coat. Cattle with this trait may be able to better withstand hot temperatures. Beef from these cows hasn’t come onto the market yet.
Another Minnesota firm, Calyxt, came out with a gene-edited soybean oil in 2019 that’s free of trans fats, but the product uses an older form of gene editing known as TALENs.