Potato CRISPR: Gene-edited spuds fit for the future

As the world searches for more efficient and hardier crops to feed our growing population, one company has been looking into turning the humble potato into a super spud. The work was carried out with the support of UK Research and Innovation. Will Tingle has the story…

Will - Hi, could I get one large chips, please? Thank you.

Potatoes. Boil them, mash them, stick them in a stew.

We love potatoes here in the UK. In 2023, the average person here ate 66 kilograms of spuds. But the potato is in a spot of bother right now.

Extreme weather conditions like flood and drought are lowering the number of potatoes we can harvest here in the UK. Brexit has caused a labour shortage, meaning new potato farms are struggling to stay afloat. Further afield, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has greatly reduced the number that we can import from Europe's breadbasket.

And because of all these factors, the impact of any wasted potato is now felt exponentially more. So to see what's being done to combat these problems, I headed up to B-Hive Innovations in Lincoln to see what their game plan is now that the chips are down.

Vidyanath - Hello, my name is Vidyanath Gururajan. I am CEO of B-Hive Innovations Limited and we are a commercial R&D business in agriculture.

Will - In the pantheon of food, why did you go for the potato? I've spent nearly two decades of my life in the world of potatoes.

Vidyanath - Potatoes are one of the largest growing staple crops. It's exposed to a lot of climate change implications that we are facing. Now, I watched a documentary not too long ago called The Martian, in which a man called Mark Watney was stuck on a red planet. He seemed to subsist quite well on just potatoes.

Will - Is that another thing, another reason why you might have picked them because they are pretty omni-nutritious?

Vidyanath - I'm biased, but I would say yes. Potatoes and milk, I think the satiety that it brings can last longer.

Will - And was there a particular species of potato that you've focused on?

Vidyanath - In this particular aspect of the project that we are looking at, we got Solanum tuberosum, which is a variety that we picked called Maris Piper, which is the most known and used variety in the UK.

The second one that we picked for our experimentation is Solanum phureja, but you then make it a hybrid potato, bringing phureja and tuberosum together to create these varieties.

Will - What are the, I won't say design flaws, but what are the aspects of the potato that you're hoping to improve?
Vidyanath - I like the challenge, but this is a very interesting challenge that we are facing as someone who grows crops, because you've got extremities of climate change happening that you're seeing, whether it's too wet, no water at all, too much of sun, no sun at all, that has an implication on the crop.

The second thing that I would like to say is we are in an age where everybody's racing towards net zero. At the same time, the chemicals that we used to increase the productivity and therefore yield in the crop during the industrial revolution and agricultural revolution are being steadily withdrawn, rightly so in certain aspects, because of the pesticides used and everything else. And then finally, we also want the food to be as cheap as possible.

Simply put, these are conflictory challenges. A continuous improvement or status quo won't solve these problems. If we have to solve these together, I strongly believe we need to break the glass ceiling and that's where innovation comes in. And in this particular subject, I see gene editing as a very useful tool which could help us fast track our innovation to solve those challenges that I mentioned. So the key to unlocking a potato's potential lies in its genes. We all have a recipe book in our DNA that dictates how we look and act and the potato is no different.

The genes dictate how well a spud grows, how quickly it cooks, how resilient it is to hard knocks that would render it otherwise pretty inedible. So if we can tweak the genes responsibly, perhaps we can turn a puny potato into a super spud.

Barbara - Hello, my name is Barbara Cujalle and I'm Principal Research Scientist here at Beehive Innovations.

Will - How do you know what you're looking for? As in, how can you look at a strand of G's, C's, A's and T's and then go, that is what we want to alter or omit, this is what we want to do in order to make it hardier or quicker cooking, as opposed to something else where you look at it and go, oh that's just skin colour, I don't want to touch that bit.

Barbara - We have what are called reference genomes. So when you sequence and you have the information of the entire genome, you get this entire information. This is part one.

Part two then is actually a combination of what you have now acquired as your sequence genome and what you already know from other works that other scientists have done in the lab regarding these traits. So each trait, each capacity, ability of an organism will be defined with a gene in its genome. So we know which genes will allow a potato to cook quicker or to not bruise as easily.

So once we know what to look for, we go to our big puzzle and we find in our maris piper, what it is, and that's the one we will target in our studies.

Will - How do you then alter that gene in order to make it into what you want?

Barbara - We use a technique called CRISPR-Cas9. So this technique is actually not new, it's a method that was adapted from a naturally occurring process in bacteria. Bacteria use this to defend themselves from viruses, meaning bacteria are able to cut pieces from infecting viruses and insert them into their own DNA.

So this entire technology is based around this and the way we do this, we use something called guide RNA. So this will tell the CRISPR-Cas9, which is this enzyme that will cut, where it should cut. We use this guide RNA that's now, for example, targeting our bruising resistance gene.

We take it there with our guide RNA and then CRISPR-Cas9 will cut it. This cut makes it deactivate this protein, this enzyme, so it's a protein with a function. In this case, the function is to make the tuberosum go black.

So we cut it and it no longer works, meaning the potato now will be more resistant to bruising. The beauty of this is because you are targeting just a very small fraction of your organism, the remaining genome is exactly as it is, so we don't expect any unintended consequences in this organism after doing this process.

Will - That's reduced bruising. Are there any other aspects of the potato that you've been looking to snip out?

Barbara - Within this project, we're also looking at cooking quicker, and the reason for this is there are a few studies that have looked at the pheruja, which is this wild relative of our common potato, that cooks much quicker, in half the time. So we are also targeting this gene within maris piper, so this will have implications like using half of the energy when you need to cook it without, again, hopefully any other effects coming from it.

Will - I cannot wait for the day where I don't have to spend 30 minutes stood by my potatoes waiting for them to boil. Once you've taken out the genes that you don't want, how does that translate into scaling that up? Is it a case of you've then got your potato and you plant it and those genes are passed on to its offspring?

Barbara - Yes, kind of like that. We don't breed two potatoes together, meaning once you have this potato that has this trait, it will multiply it and all potatoes coming from here will have this trait. The only thing against us is there's only so many potatoes you can grow from each potato you have, so it takes time to have a large enough quantity to be able to plant large areas that will be commercially relevant, but it is a matter of time really.

Will - So the science behind a better potato is sound, but it is important to stress that this has to also be viewed under the lens of a business proposition. Whilst being a supreme technical achievement, having a better standard of spud is not much use unless it can be rolled out into supply and onto our plates. So how does this scientific wizardry translate out into the wider world?

Vidyanath - I would like to say it's very simple, but it's as complicated as gene editing, because it's not simple in the aspect of there's a new variety, let's just go and put it in the market. None of this has been nailed in terms of: this is how we're going to do it, because it's very much in its infancy.

Will - Let's talk about the policy terms. What classifies a variety?

Vidyanath - A variety has to be distinct. So if you are gene editing a variety, does it become a new variety or part of an existing variety?

The second thing is the consumer acceptance. As much as this is fun doing the science, would a supermarket stock a gene edited potato? And what are the implications of labelling? What are the implications of the consumer understanding the difference between gene modification, which is not what we're doing, to gene editing?

So there's a number of things that between us we all need to navigate and come to an arrangement where we could see this becoming a gene edited variety that you can buy. I do have my hope that within five years time, we should be in a position where these things have been boxed, released and accepted. You've got your potato.

Will - It looks great so far. But as you said, there's a wide range of foods out there that you're not so much competing with, but you are alongside. Do you ever believe that you might be crossing into a different type of food to create a more durable, better version of them too?

I firmly believe gene editing will become a very important tool if it's not already in the minds of people who are breeding crops. Our team now is working on onion crops, strawberries, a lot of brassica crops and much more. So these things tend to start with the humble spud and spread along any other crop that we can find that we can make value out of.