J.R. Simplot Company and Plant Sciences Inc., both privately-held companies, said they expect to launch the first commercially available, gene-edited strawberries within a few years.
"It's the same technology we're working on with potatoes," said Doug Cole, director of Marketing and Biotech Affairs at Simplot. "We have the opportunity to do that with this technology." Steve Nelson, president and chief executive officer of Plant Sciences Inc., said the company over the last 35 years has developed five distinct breeding populations of strawberries that do best in various growing areas and climate types.
He said for growers, who can spend $35,000 an acre to plant strawberries and another $35,000 per acre to harvest them, gene-edited strawberries could reduce the risk of a crop failure. The gene editing technology is called CRISPR-Cas9, the first part an acronym for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats." The technology speeds up the traditional process of breeding generation after generation of plants to get a certain desirable trait, saving years in developing new varieties that are as safe as traditionally developed varieties, scientists say.
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