Eight gene-edited strawberry lines from the Idaho food and agriculture company J.R. Simplot have cleared an early regulatory step in England that brings them closer to field trials and, eventually, to sale.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) published a marketing notice on 21 August 2026 confirming the lines as precision bred organisms under the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Regulations 2025. The English rules are lighter than the European Union's GMO regime: they allow gene-edited crops to reach the market without a full GMO dossier, provided the edits could in principle have arisen through natural or conventional breeding and no foreign DNA is inserted.
The trait is remontancy, the ability to flower and fruit repeatedly through the season instead of giving one concentrated harvest. Simplot used the CRISPR-Cas9 tool to knock out copies of a gene called Terminal Flower 1 (Tfl1), which acts as a brake on continuous flowering in many plants. Because commercial strawberries are octoploid, several copies had to be edited; in one line, S4A-210, all seven copies were altered.
The editing machinery was delivered with Agrobacterium but only expressed temporarily, and no Cas9 gene or other foreign DNA remained in the final plants, according to the filing. Simplot checked over three generations of runner propagation that the edits stayed stable and that no unintended changes appeared, using PCR testing and nanopore sequencing.
Simplot plans line-selection field trials in England during 2026, including taste tests to make sure longer fruiting has not cost flavour. It intends to market the berries in England, Wales and Scotland once registration is complete, but they must still pass a Food Standards Agency food-safety review before reaching shops.
Photo: Den yngre / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: Global Agriculture
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