🍅🔥 Ever thought tomatoes could beat the heat? Thanks to some brilliant minds from the Chinese mainland, our future salads might just survive global warming! 🥗🌍
As climate change turns up the planet's thermostat, crops worldwide are feeling the sizzle. 🌞 Scientists project that a 2°C rise in global temperatures could slash average crop yields by 3 to 13%. Yikes! 😱 That's where these climate-smart tomatoes come in.
Researchers from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences have pulled off a game-changer. Using cutting-edge gene-editing tools, they've jazzed up a tomato gene called LIN5 with a heat-shock element. Translation? These tomatoes can keep their cool when things get hot, reducing sugar loss and staying delicious even under heat stress. 🍅✨
Tests in greenhouses and open fields, across different seasons and spots, showed some seriously impressive results. These super tomatoes pumped up yields by 14 to 47% in regular conditions and a whopping 26 to 33% when the heat was on! 🔥 They managed to dodge 56 to 100% of the usual heat-induced yield losses. Talk about resilience! 💪
Published recently in the journal Cell, this breakthrough could be a total game-changer for food security. With climate change posing big questions, innovations like this give us hope that science can help keep our plates full and our planet healthy. 🌎❤️
Reference(s):
Chinese scientists pioneer climate-smart crops to fight global warming
cgtn.com
