Fish and dairy are the best dietary sources of vitamin D, which can make it a struggle for those following a plant-based diet to get enough of the essential micronutrient. Vitamin D helps protect our bones and keep our muscles and teeth healthy.
Now, a team of researchers has come up with a potential new, vegan source of vitamin D: the tomato gene edited using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to contain a precursor to vitamin D.
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If the process is adopted commercially by farmers and growers, these tomatoes could help fight vitamin D insufficiency, which the study says affects 1 billion people worldwide.
“This exciting discovery not only improves human health, but contributes to the environmental benefits associated with more plant-based diets – often associated with a challenge in securing some important vitamins and minerals that are widely found and bioavailable in animal products,” Guy Poppy, teacher. of ecology from the University of Southampton, to the Science Media Center in London. He was not involved in the research.
Vitamin D supplements are widely available in many countries, but co-author Cathie Martin, a professor at the John Innes Center in Norwich, England, said eating a tomato was “much better than taking a pill.”
“I think having a food source (of vitamin D) in the form of a plant also means you can get additional benefits from eating tomatoes. We don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables anyway. A tomato is a good source of vitamin C too,” she told a news conference. The study was published Monday in the scientific journal Nature Plants.
sunshine vitamin
The main source of vitamin D for most people is diet, but our bodies also produce the micronutrient when our skin is exposed to UVB light – which is why it is sometimes called the sunshine vitamin. Scientists have harnessed a similar process in tomato plants.
The compound in the skin that can produce vitamin D is known as 7-DHC, or provitamin D3, and is also found in tomato leaves and unripe fruits.
The researchers blocked a gene in tomato plants that normally converts provitamin D3 to cholesterol, which allowed provitamin D3 to accumulate in the ripe tomato fruit.
To convert provitamin D3 into vitamin D3 which helps our body, tomatoes were treated with UVB light. The study found that the provitamin D3 in a tomato — once converted to vitamin D3 — would be equivalent to the amount of vitamin D3 contained in two medium-sized eggs or 28 grams (1 ounce) of tuna.
A test in the UK is evaluating whether growing tomato plants outdoors, where they would be exposed to natural sunlight, would automatically result in the conversion of 7-DHC to vitamin D3. The first fruits should ripen by the end of June, Martin said. Tomatoes can also be sun-dried after harvesting, eliminating the need for UVB light treatment, she added.
The UK Parliament passed new legislation earlier this year designed to make it easier to test gene-edited cultures.
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