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.

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Hello, my name is Vidyanath Gururajan. I am CEO of B-Hive Innovations Limited and we are a commercial R&D business in agriculture. … Potatoes are one of the largest growing staple crops. … [T]he 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.

Hello, my name is Barbara Cujalle and I’m Principal Research Scientist here at Beehive Innovations. … [T]he 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.

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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.

Editor’s Note: Excerpted from an interview by Will Tingle of Vidyanath Gururajan and Barbara Correia

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