Gene editing startup We want to help you eat healthier salads. This month, North Carolina-based Pairwise A new type of mustard greens Designed to be less bitter than the original plant. This vegetable is the first Crispr-edited food to enter the US market.
Mustard greens are rich in vitamins and minerals, but when eaten raw, they have a strong peppery flavor. To make it more palatable, it is usually cooked. Pairwise wanted to preserve the health benefits of mustard greens while making them more palatable to the average shopper, so the company’s scientists used his DNA-editing tool, Crispr, to change the pungent taste of mustard greens. deleted the gene responsible for The company hopes consumers will choose its vegetables over less nutritious options like icebergs and butter lettuce.
“We basically created a new category of salads,” says Pairwise co-founder and CEO Tom Adams. The vegetable will initially be sold at select restaurants and other stores in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Paul area of St. Louis and Springfield, Massachusetts. The company will begin stocking groceries with vegetables this summer, possibly the first in the Pacific Northwest.
A naturally occurring part of the bacterial immune system, Chrispr was first utilized as a gene-editing tool in 2012. Since then, scientists have envisioned lofty uses for this technology. If we could tweak the genetic code of plants, we could, at least in theory, put the traits we wanted into them. For example, you can create crops that produce higher yields, are more resistant to pests and diseases, or require less water. Chrispr has yet to end world hunger, but in the short term it could give consumers more variety in what they eat.
Pairwise’s goal is to make already healthy foods even more convenient and enjoyable. The company is working not only on mustard greens, but also on fruit improvements. The company uses his Crispr to develop seedless blackberries and seedless cherries. “Our lifestyles and needs are evolving, and we are becoming more aware of nutritional deficiencies,” says Haven Baker, co-founder and chief business officer of Pairwise. 2019 is just about 1 in 10 US adults According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, you’re getting the recommended daily intake of 1.5 to 2 cups of fruit and 2 to 3 cups of vegetables.
Strictly speaking, new mustard greens are not genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. GMOs in agriculture refer to products made by adding genetic material from an entirely different species. These are crops that could not be produced by traditional breeding, that is, selecting parent plants with specific traits to produce offspring with more desirable traits.
Instead, Crispr fine-tunes the genes of the organism itself. No foreign DNA is added. One of the benefits of Crispr is that new plant varieties can be achieved in a fraction of the time it takes to produce new plants by conventional breeding. It took Pairwise just four years to bring mustard greens to market. With centuries of cross-breeding, it can take him a decade or more to bring out the desired traits.
