Event Date
Dr. Sunghwa Choe will offer a special seminar describing his work to make tomatoes even healthier by boosting their vitamin content. Choe uses CRISPR gene editing to enhance provitamin D3 in tomatoes, aiming to help solve a worldwide nutritional deficiency.
He’ll also discuss related research in which he uses CRISPR RNP editing of plant protoplasts, and glyco-engineering of Nicotiana benthamiana glycosyltransferases for therapeutic protein production.
Choe is a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Seoul National University in South Korea. He’s also CEO of G+FLAS Life Sciences, Inc., a Seoul-based biotechnology firm that specializes in developing CRISPR genome editing technology and applications.
The seminar will be live and in-person. To participate via Zoom, email to tkleist@ucdavis.edu.
Tomatoes do not usually have any vitamin D, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. In December 2023, G+FLAS and Bayer AG signed a letter of intent to collaborate on developing novel tomato varieties that do contain vitamin D3, using CRISPR to edit the plants’ genome, according to a Bayer press release and a FruitNet.com report.
“Vitamin D deficiency is a widespread issue globally, particularly in countries where winter sunlight is limited,” Bayer reported. It affects an estimated one billion people globally, according to the World Health Organization, and can lead to a range of health issues, including rickets. “Ensuring adequate levels of vitamin D3 in the human diet is a critical goal in crop breeding,” Choe wrote.
Bayer AG, based in Germany, is one of the largest pharmaceutical and biomedical corporations in the world. It also is a plant biotechnology powerhouse, producing a large share of the world’s agricultural seeds and pesticides.
Read more about the connections among Bayer, biotechnology, tomatoes and UC Davis here.