The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding research to genetically engineer tomatoes to be able to disrupt the reproductive cycle of the whitefly, a common insect that damages tomato plants, Jon Fleetwood reported on Substack.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — a division of the U.S. Department of Defense — also funded the research as part of its “Insect Allies” project, according to a study on the tomatoes published last month in BMC Plant Biology.

“Problems of transgene expression silencing and, more strikingly, major deformities were observed in these sucker plant clones,” Antoniou said. “This is not unexpected, given the known tendency for transgene silencing and the highly mutagenic nature of the GM transformation process as a whole, which can lead to major DNA damage and disruptions in gene expression patterns.”