U.S. companies announce plans for gene-edited strawberries

  • 📰 CTVNews
  • ⏱ Reading Time:
  • 53 sec. here
  • 2 min. at publisher
  • 📊 Quality Score:
  • News: 25%
  • Publisher: 99%

Nigeria News News

Nigeria Nigeria Latest News,Nigeria Nigeria Headlines

An Idaho company that successfully brought genetically modified potatoes to the market announced an agreement Thursday to help a California-based plant breeding company grow strawberries they say will stay fresh longer and have a longer growing season.

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.

 

Thank you for your comment. Your comment will be published after being reviewed.
Please try again later.

Buy local & support Canadian farmers.🇨🇦

We have summarized this news so that you can read it quickly. If you are interested in the news, you can read the full text here. Read more:

 /  🏆 1. in NG

Nigeria Nigeria Latest News, Nigeria Nigeria Headlines