If you wanted to create better blackberries, you could try to breed a variety without the seeds that get stuck in your teeth. Or one without the thorns that make the berries hard to pick. Or you could aim for more environmentally efficient plants that produce more berries per acre with less water and fewer chemicals.
With decades of work and a fair amount of luck, you might achieve one of those goals.
But a North Carolina startup called Pairwise is using the gene-editing technology called Crispr to try to achieve all those goals at once, crafting seedless, thornless, higher-yielding blackberry plants—and in a matter of years rather than decades.
That’s the promise of modern genomics: introducing speed, precision, and the ability to solve multiple problems at once to the glacially slow, haphazard, one-tweak-at-a-time world of crop breeding.
Pairwise’s triple-threat berries won’t be in US groceries before 2030—even turbo-charged breeding takes time—but they could help jump-start a new agricultural revolution, a high-tech era of designer crops optimized to benefit consumers, farmers, and the Earth. The company is also working on peaches without pits, row crops resistant to a variety of diseases, fruit and nut trees that produce their first harvest within a year or two rather than three to eight, and a slew of other novel products, often in partnership with some of the world’s largest agribusinesses.
So far, the market for gene-edited food is almost entirely theoretical. Pairwise launched the first Crispr product in the US in 2023, a less bitter mustard green. It said it was discontinuing the product in early 2024 in favor of developing other gene-edited crops. Today, the company has received more than 50 regulatory approvals for five edited crops in nine countries, but it has only one creation for sale, a high-yielding blackberry variety available in limited quantities in Colombia.
Unlike genetically modified organisms—crops tweaked with DNA from different species—Crispr seeds haven’t yet faced major roadblocks from regulators or intense hostility from the public. That doesn’t mean backlash won’t come, though.
Crispr was only invented in 2012, and there’s still danger that it could get swept up in the political and cultural backlash against “Frankenfoods” that has limited the impact of GMOs. The rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement is just one symptom of the growing discomfort consumers have with the notion of edible technology. Given the lingering unpopularity of GMOs, despite decades of scientific evidence that they don’t harm human health or the environment, even industry analysts who consider Crispr safer and more useful are reluctant to predict the success of the next revolution.
“Historically, there’s been so much pushback against genetic engineering in agriculture,” says Julius Beau Lucks, the codirector of Northwestern University’s Center for Synthetic Biology. The stakes are high, though. “I don’t know if we’ll see it again with editing, but if we do, it will be really hard to solve the world’s food problems.”
Over the next few decades, the world’s farmers will need to produce much more food to feed a growing population while using much less land and doing much less damage to nature to avoid cascading environmental crises. The world is on track to deforest another dozen California’s worth of land for agriculture by 2050, and technological fixes like vertical farms, artificial-intelligence-driven tractors, and less resource-intensive meat substitutes forged from plants or animal cells have struggled in the marketplace.
But the scientists who founded Pairwise believe their product has a chance to break through because Crispr can help farmers grow healthier and more abundant food in a warming world, with significantly less deforestation, agri-chemicals, or greenhouse gas emissions. The company is already developing an enormous pipeline of new crops customized for higher yields; longer shelf life; better resistance to heat, droughts, storms, pests, or diseases; the ability to grow in different regions or seasons or soils; and various combinations of those desirable traits. It has raised more than $160 million, and ever since its short-lived experiment with non-bitter greens, it has focused on licensing its technology rather than building its own brands. It now has working partnerships with the Big Ag giants Bayer and Corteva, the food companies Mars and Sun World, and an array of universities and other research institutions.
Just as an electric vehicle doesn’t have to look like a conventional car thanks to a small engine, Crispr has the potential to transform food and farms in unexpected ways. When I visited Pairwise headquarters in Durham in May, I got to see one of the world’s first cherry bushes. Its appearance surely would have confused George Washington, but Pairwise envisions a future where it can help growers produce more fruit with less land compared to standard cherry trees, and will also make it easier to spray and harvest with machines. Pairwise chief executive officer Tom Adams told me that ordinary-looking bush could be the first step towards a more sustainable and economical form of orchard for all kinds of fruit, because the trait that got tweaked isn’t only found in cherries.
“It’s exciting how one change can fundamentally transform how a food is grown,” said Adams, who oversaw Monsanto’s biotechnology work before it became part of Bayer. “Then we can make more changes that make the food even better. Then we can make similar changes with other foods.”
Humans have been breeding crops for as long as they’ve been growing them, initially by selecting seeds from high-performing plants, later by crossing varieties to combine high-performance traits. That’s how barely edible grasses became corn, a single wild mustard species became broccoli, cauliflower and kale, and tomatoes expanded from berry size to baseball size.
But even after the introduction of GMO crops in the late 20th century, breeding has remained a painfully slow and frustratingly random process, relying on unpredictable mutations and inevitable trade-offs. Corn has 40,000 different genes, so mixing and matching plants creates almost infinite variables. If you breed fruit that takes longer to spoil, it might lose flavor or yield; if you breed rice that needs less water, it might need more fertilizer. It can take a generation to develop and test a new variety.
Using Crispr has the potential to sidestep these problems. Once Pairwise’s scientists identify a trait, they can use their editing platform to manipulate that trait alone—by turning it on or off, or fine-tuning its expression. For instance, after isolating the trait that controls how many rows of kernels grow on a single ear of corn, they worked with Bayer to optimize the number of rows in order to maximize the output of grain. They’re now planning to stack that edit with a bunch of other edits of “minor-effect” corn traits—shorter stalks to avoid wind damage, heat and drought tolerance to adapt to climate change, more efficient use of fertilizer—to create new varieties with major yield and resilience advantages.
“That’s the big unlock, this truly unprecedented ability to imagine the kind of corn we want and create it with speed and scale,” said Michael Graham, the head of research and development for Bayer’s crop science division.
The experts say Crispr is already at least 95 percent faster than conventional plant breeding, and artificial intelligence models that help pinpoint where and how to edit genes are further accelerating the process. But the biggest advantage of editing is the ability to stack multiple improvements to plants. Pairwise didn’t have to cross seedless blackberries with the best-tasting blackberries and hope the seedless offspring taste good; they just edited the best-tasting variety to make it seedless. And yes, I did sample a seedless berry in Durham; it tasted just like the regular berry I tried for comparison, only with a much smoother and softer mouthfeel.
In other words, it has benefits for consumers—at least, if you’d rather not get blackberry seeds stuck in your teeth—which is something Adams thought about a lot when he launched Pairwise. At Monsanto, he realized that the benefits of GMO’s like “Roundup Ready” row crops engineered to be sprayed with that now ubiquitous weed-killer accrued almost entirely to farmers growing animal feed and obscure ingredients. (It certainly didn’t help that the company ended up paying hefty settlements to farm workers and gardeners who claimed that spraying Roundup had made them sick.)
“We talked about how cool the science was, not what’s in it for you,” Adams recalls. So he made sure Pairwise’s early focus was fruit and vegetables consumers buy directly, with edits that make them more pleasant to eat, not just more profitable to grow.
GMOs are extremely expensive to develop, which is why giant agribusinesses focusing on big commodity crops largely control them. That setup has prompted widespread complaints from farmers and grocery shoppers alike that they reduce crop diversity and limit choice.
But gene editing is much cheaper and less time-consuming, which Adams believes will make it a more accessible and democratic technology. Pairwise is working with nonprofits like the Gates Foundation and International Institute of Tropical Agriculture to develop more resilient staple crops like cowpea and cassava that can better withstand pests, diseases, and droughts. Leena Tripathi, a molecular biologist who oversees genetic innovation for IITA, is optimistic about semi-dwarf Crispr yams that will be much less labor-intensive for the African women who usually grow them.
“Gene editing can be such a powerful tool to help smallholder farmers,” Tripathi said. “They live on the edge. When they lose a crop, they can’t send their kids to school.”
But the Trump administration’s evisceration of the US Agency for International Development has ravaged the budgets of groups like IITA, which could make it harder to get Crispr seeds to subsistence farmers. The benefits, though, could be major: “This could finally help them get access to quality seeds,” Tripathi says.
Bayer says it deploys roughly 450 new crop varieties every year, and Graham says that within a decade, he expects every new variety to incorporate at least some edited genes.
Corteva spends nearly $1.5 billion on research and development every year, and vice president for biotechnology Wendy Srnic says using Crispr to prevent crop diseases is the company’s top R&D priority. By 2030, it hopes to release a corn product with four different genes edited to resist four of the worst North American diseases that eat into yields.
“This is the holy grail, the ability to make the precise changes you want rather than searching for a needle in the haystack,” said Srnic. “Our mission is to help farmers get more productive on their land so they don’t need more land, and this makes me hopeful we can do it.”
So far, governments around the world have largely accepted Big Ag’s argument that gene editing is essentially an extremely sped-up version of conventional plant breeding and therefore doesn’t need particularly onerous regulation. Even the EU, which has restricted most GMO’s, moved last month to treat most gene-edited crops like regular ones. But regulators have been more cautious of Crispr livestock; the US Food and Drug Administration regulates edited animals as if they were drugs, and has required scientists to incinerate them after studying them.
The basic argument for caution is that we don’t know what we don’t know, that meddling with genetics can have unintended consequences for our health and the planet. But to advocates like Alison Van Eenennaam, a UC Davis geneticist who has tried to reduce the environmental footprint of beef by creating the first cattle embryos edited to ensure more efficient male calves, pseudoscientific fears of the “unnatural” are getting in the way of solving agriculture’s most pressing problems. She plans to move to Australia’s University of Queensland, where she’ll be able to edit with impunity.
“It’s so depressing,” Van Eenannaam says. “People would rather have famines than technology that scares them. And if there’s no path to market, nobody’s going to invest in the technology.”
The British startup Tropic Biosciences is bringing a non-browning banana to market, but most Crispr crops are at least a few years away. Startups will need more funding to make it to market, but those needs come as investments in ag-tech and food-tech have dropped 70 percent since peaking above $50 billion in 2021. The dip is partly due to AI sucking up all the venture capital oxygen, but it’s partly because venture capitalists feel burned by the struggles of former unicorns like plant-based burger startup Beyond Meat and indoor farming pioneer AppHarvest.
EcoTech Capital managing director Adam Bergman, an investment banker focusing on climate-friendly technologies, says there’s only been about $3 billion in investment in gene-edited seed startups over the last decade. But he believes they have the greatest potential to disrupt the agricultural sector.
He thinks there’s some nervousness that the GMO story could repeat itself, if regulators get cold feet or consumers get freaked out. And food and farming have always been tough, low-margin businesses for venture capitalists craving quick, high-multiple returns. It takes time for Crispr crops to be created by scientists and field-tested by farmers and distributed to consumers at profitable prices.
“That’s the thing about agriculture: Change is always slow, even with great tech,” Bergman said.
Crispr can accelerate the pace of change, and the dream of tastier, healthier food grown on higher-yielding, less-polluting farms is no longer a pipe dream. But Crispr remains a new technology, still in its teenage years. It will take years or even decades for it to mature and an industry to grow up with it.
Yet Adams is confident Crispr will build a brave new world of seedless, thornless blackberries and mega-yielding disease-resistant corn and bushy cherry orchards.
“This is the crest of a wave that’s coming,” he said. “I wish it was already here.”
This article was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent, nonprofit news organization.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: wired.com
