A 17-year-old senior at Ransom Everglades High School is working to genetically engineer tomato plants that could produce tomatoes with a hamburger-like taste, and she already has the paperwork to back up the ambition: a United States patent issued in June 2026 that lists her as an inventor. Gabriella Rothberg founded a company called Impossible Vines to pursue the idea, and she says the project has recently started moving faster than ever.
Rothberg first began exploring the concept at age 15, according to Miami New Times, which first reported on her project. The patent names both Rothberg and her father, Jonathan Rothberg, as inventors, with Impossible Vines Inc. listed as the assignee, the outlet reports. She works alongside Maddison Marshall, a University of Miami PhD candidate, on the lab side of the effort.
Splicing Heme Into a Backyard Vegetable
The core idea is to introduce genetic material that would allow tomato plants to produce heme, an iron-containing molecule that contributes to meat flavor, per the same report. It's the same molecule that gives Impossible Foods' plant-based burgers their meaty taste, though that company makes its heme using soy leghemoglobin produced by genetically engineered yeast, according to Impossible Foods. Rothberg's approach instead relies on a process that uses agrobacterium to introduce genetic material directly into the plant, the Miami New Times account states.
Rothberg has said she used artificial intelligence to help draft a business plan and a patent application, and to design the tomato plants' genetic constructs. “AI helped make the project possible,” she said, crediting the technology with assisting on the business plan, the patent, and the gene constructs themselves, per the Miami New Times report.
A Family Steeped in Biotech and Cancer Research
The project did not emerge in a vacuum. Rothberg has said her parents discussed evolution, astronomy, and physics at the dinner table growing up. Her father, Jonathan Rothberg, helped pioneer next-generation DNA sequencing through the biotechnology company 454 Life Sciences and received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama in 2016, according to the same outlet. Her mother, Bonnie Gould Rothberg, is a physician and cancer researcher who, per the article, worked at Yale and has since joined a University of Miami initiative studying cancer risks among firefighters.
Alongside the heme work, Rothberg is exploring ways to boost the lycopene that tomatoes naturally produce, the Miami New Times report notes. Lycopene is the compound responsible for much of a tomato's red color, and it has been studied for a possible role in reducing cancer risk. A patent filing connected to Jonathan Rothberg describes methods for enhancing lycopene content in tomato plants through genetic modification or selective breeding, according to Justia Patents.
The Science Behind Lycopene Is Still Contested
Research has not established that consuming more lycopene actually prevents cancer, and the scientific record on the question is mixed. The Food and Drug Administration concluded in a 2007 evidence review that it found no credible evidence to support an association between lycopene intake and a reduced risk of prostate, lung, colorectal, gastric, breast, ovarian, endometrial, or pancreatic cancer, according to a report indexed on PubMed. A 2025 systematic review included 121 prospective studies, with 119 included in the meta-analysis, which reported that high dietary lycopene intake was associated with a 5 percent lower overall cancer risk compared with low intake, per Frontiers in Nutrition. That same analysis also found inverse associations between cancer mortality and total tomato intake, lycopene intake, and blood lycopene levels.
Rothberg's hopes for the project go beyond flavor novelty. She has said the technology could improve nutrient access in places where meat is expensive or hard to obtain, and that it could specifically benefit pregnant women in developing countries, the Miami New Times article states. She envisions families growing vegetables containing additional nutrients instead of relying on livestock, and she has said the tomatoes may eventually provide meaningful amounts of absorbable iron, depending on future test results.
A Growing-Medium Mistake, Then a Breakthrough
The path hasn't been smooth. Rothberg and Marshall discovered that their plant growth medium had an incorrect vitamin concentration, a mistake that had been stalling their work, according to the outlet's reporting. Once they corrected the problem, growth appeared within weeks, and Rothberg has described the project as moving faster than ever since.
Impossible Vines joins a wider field of plant molecular farming, in which plants are engineered to express target molecules like the animal proteins found in dairy or eggs, according to the Good Food Institute. The nonprofit notes that the approach allows production of alternative proteins inside a plant using photosynthesis and well-established farming techniques, and that it is broadly applicable to crop improvement. It adds that plant molecular farming could occur on open fields where allowed, sidestepping the scaling challenges associated with large bioreactors, and that the underlying bioprocessing technology is mature enough that companies are using it to produce recombinant proteins in novel ways.
Other Engineered Tomatoes Offer a Preview
Rothberg's tomato wouldn't be the first genetically modified produce aimed at health or novelty. The push for nutrient-dense GMOs is described as a recent trend in agricultural biotechnology, per NPR, which reported that Norfolk Plant Sciences spent roughly 20 years working color genes from a snapdragon flower into a tomato to create the Purple Tomato — the first genetically modified food crop directly marketed to U.S. home gardeners. The outlet also noted that Fresh Del Monte created a pink pineapple in 2020 using elevated lycopene levels, and that researchers released a conventionally bred, deep-blue Indigo Rose tomato back in 2011.
Not every engineered tomato has stuck around. Calgene's FLAVR SAVR tomato reached the U.S. market in 1994 but disappeared by 1997 after Calgene was acquired by Monsanto, according to AgFunderNews, which also reports that Norfolk Healthy Produce is preparing a limited-scale U.S. launch of tomatoes engineered to carry high levels of health-promoting anthocyanins throughout the flesh rather than just the skin. NPR also reported that researchers released a conventionally bred, deep-blue Indigo Rose tomato in 2011.
What Regulatory Approval Would Require
Any path to market for a tomato like Rothberg's would likely run through federal regulators. For now, Impossible Vines remains a high-school-born startup with a patent in hand and a founder who says the science is accelerating by the week.
