Israeli Scientists Find Way to Grow Tomatoes Using Less Water

Israeli scientists have found a way to grow vegetables using a fraction of the water that is required today to do so. Researchers from Tel Aviv University say they have succeeded in cultivating and characterizing tomato varieties with higher water use efficiency without compromising yield.

The researchers, employing CRISPR genetic editing technology, were able to grow tomatoes that consume less water while preserving yield, quality, and taste.

This breakthrough addresses the growing global fresh water crisis and other environmental concerns that come from the massive production of various crops. Just look at the problems faced by California in recent years. That state produces so many grapes for wine, nuts, oranges, and other crops that it is literally running out of water.

It is yet another example of Startup Nation Israel taking the lead in finding ways to make food production more environmentally friendly. Just last week Pluri, an Israeli biotech company that transforms cells into “solutions that promote global well-being and sustainability,” made history by launching a cell-based coffee business. Pluri’s cell-based coffee product is designed to address the growing global demand for sustainable, high-quality coffee at mass-scale production, without the harm to the environment that comes from the massive production of various crops.

The Mayo Clinic explains that CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”) stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats – repetitive fragments of DNA that bacteria use to defend themselves against invading viruses. Viruses can infect bacteria, just like they can infect people.

The new research was conducted in the laboratories of Prof. Shaul Yalovsky and Dr. Nir Sade, and was led by a team of researchers from the School of Plant Sciences and Food Security at Tel Aviv University’s Wise Faculty of Life Sciences. The team included Dr. Mallikarjuna Rao Puli, a former postdoctoral fellow supervised by Prof. Yalovsky, and Purity Muchoki, a doctoral student jointly supervised by Prof. Yalovsky and Dr. Sade. Additional students and postdoctoral fellows from TAU’s School of Plant Sciences and Food Security, along with researchers from Ben Gurion University and the University of Oregon, also contributed to the research. The study’s findings were published in the academic journal PNAS.

The researchers explain that in light of global warming and the diminishing of freshwater resources, there is a growing demand for agricultural crops that consume less water without compromising yield. Naturally, at the same time, because agricultural crops rely on water to grow and develop, it is particularly challenging to identify suitable plant varieties.

In a process called transpiration, plants evaporate water from their leaves. Concurrently, carbon dioxide enters into the leaves, and is assimilated into sugar by photosynthesis, which also takes place in the leaves. These two processes — transpiration and carbon dioxide uptake — occur simultaneously through special openings in the surface of leaves called stomata. The stomata can open and close, serving as a mechanism through which plants regulate their water status.

“We discovered that eliminating ROP9 by the CRISPR technology cause a partial closure of the stomata. This effect is particularly pronounced during midday, when the rate of water loss from the plants in the transpiration process is at its highest,” said Prof. Yalovsky. “Conversely, in the morning and afternoon, when the transpiration rate is lower, there was no significant difference in the rate of water loss between the control plants and ROP9-modified plants. Because the stomata remained open in the morning and afternoon, the plants were able to uptake enough carbon dioxide, preventing any decline in sugar production by photosynthesis even during the afternoon hours, when the stomata were more closed in the ROP9-modified plants.”