Today’s mass-produced tomatoes often grow to palm-sized proportions, but their naturally occurring ancestors were far smaller fruits. They were also sweeter and more flavorful due to their lower water content compared to the red fruits found in grocery stores—but recent genetic discoveries have unlocked the path to attaining the best of both worlds.

Using CRISPR, the popular gene-editing tool, scientists bumped up the fruit’s sugar content by 30 percent without sacrificing size or yields.

Rotten tomatoes no more: growing sweeter tomatoes is possible by editing just two of the fruit’s genes. Deleting the genes increased the engineered fruits’ glucose and fructose levels by up to 30% over mass-produced tomatoes, according to a study 1 published today in Nature.

Selection for bigger tomatoes has made the fruits less sweet, but now it has been shown that gene editing can make them sweeter without decreasing yields

I n a groundbreaking study published in the journal Nature, researchers have successfully used gene editing to create sweeter tomatoes without compromising their size or yield. By