There are as many aspects to life science recruitment as there are to the broad world of life sciences, but a major aspect of the field is to take new scientific and medical discoveries and adapt them for use in alternative fields.
This often takes the form of drug repositioning, where medication intended for a specific purpose turns out to be effective in a very different field, such as sildenafil and thalidomide.
This is also the reason why a machine used to recognise different types of pastry products was used to detect cancer, and why a genetic engineering technique that could change the world of medicine has first been applied to make more nutritious tomatoes.
A year after Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing the CRISPR technique for precisely changing the DNA of animals, plants, and microorganisms, one of its first publicly available applications was in agriculture.
Japanese startup, Sanatech Seed, used this technology to develop a version of the Sicilian Rouge tomato that had been modified. This reduced levels of a GABA-breaking enzyme, meaning that the tomatoes in question have five times the normal amount.
The neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) inhibits signals between nerve connections, which has been linked by some researchers to a feeling of calm, reduced stress, and better sleep, although to what extent is up for debate.
Initially, Sanatech Seed sold the seedlings to farmers that wanted them, eventually receiving 4,200 orders, and whilst the initial plan was to sell it as puree, the number of requests producers received meant that they started to sell tomatoes ahead of their planned schedule.
This makes these tomatoes the first-ever foods edited with CRISPER to go on public sale, with the second being gene-edited fish that grow larger than normal specimens due to leptin and myostatin disruption.