The sun rose on a dimly light Monday morning when Adriano Nunes-Nesi, Lázaro E.P. Peres, Agustin Zsögön, Lucas de Ávila Silva, Ronan Sulpice, and Emmanuel Rezende Naves published their groundbreaking discovery that could revolutionize the cultivation of chili’s forever.   These insanely talented and well established scientists figured out how to use the CRISPR-Cas9 editing tool to turn a tomato into    a chili.

Capsaicinoids are what give peppers their heat and when these scholars of science mapped the tomato’s and chili’s genomes, they saw that the tomato has genes that, when transcribed, produce these spicy and hot capsaicinoids.

The reason why this is important is because the chili’s cultivation process is extremely tedious and requires many specific conditions, not to mention it having a small yield.  Since the yield of tomatoes is 30x that of the chili, using the CRISPR-Cas9 tool, they could change the shape and taste of the tomato to that of a chili. The price of a chili peppers, per kg, compared to tomatoes is roughly 60 cents higher. It may not seem a ton, but in bulk orders, it quickly adds up.

Lázaro E.P. Peres, who is aProfessor of Plant Physiology at the University of São Paulo and one of the scientists on the team, says, “The proof of concept here is that we can transfer the unique thing endemic to a less-produced plant into another plant that is more widely produced”.  The paper states the tomato “is highly amenable to biotechnological manipulation”. This would drive the price of the chili down which would help markets, restaurants, and Gardners worldwide.

The only issue to this is the publics opinion. For years, the already established “organic” companies having been labelling genetically modified food as unhealthy compared to non-GMO foods.  This claim is simply outright false.  “Any plant or animal product is full of DNA that our body readily digests, messing with one or two genes isn’t going to impact human health. The only way GM food could affect human health is if the modification somehow produce a protein product that was actively toxic to humans.”  This quote is from an article by the Genetic Literacy Project, which could be seen as having bias towards GMO foods, however their mission says,”is to aid the public, media and policymakers in understanding the science and societal implications of human and agricultural genetic and biotechnology research and to promote science literacy.”  All they are interested in doing is educating the public because so many people have been lied to by big organic corporations and the media to prevent customers from eating GMO products.  What would they have to gain by saying they are safe when they are not?    If the public can get passed the idea of genetically modifying foods, I believe turning a tomato into a chili pepper would save much money from hundreds of thousands of businesses– big or small.

What do you guys and gals think of GMO products?

For more information, please go check out the primary source of this article and the researchers report