There might not be hope left for Penn State's much-hyped football team this year, but thanks to the university's researchers, there is renewed hope for a more universally beloved commodity — chocolate.

The team shared in a news release how it successfully tapped into gene-editing technology to create new cacao plants resistant to black pod disease. The findings of the full study published in Plant Biotechnology Journal offer exciting possibilities for the $135 billion global chocolate market.

It's not your imagination if you've noticed rising prices in chocolate and coffee due to growing challenges for the crop. One of the biggest culprits is crop diseases, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture said accounts for 20%-40% of crop losses.

Black pod rot is the worst of the bunch, thriving under conditions that plague all major cacao-growing regions. What the team at Penn State realized was that cacao plants do have natural defenses against the disease. Unfortunately, their TcNPR3 gene acts as a "molecular brake" on that system.

That's where gene editing using CRISPR-Cas9 technology was able to change the equation,  allowing the plant's defenses to fully activate. In testing, the genetically edited plants showed a 42% reduction in the size of their disease lesions compared to unedited plants.

Perhaps even more important, the team was able to breed offspring of its new disease-resistant cacao plants with unedited plants that maintained the enhanced protections while shedding any foreign DNA sequences. 

That matters because theoretically, these engineered disease-resistant cacao could bypass USDA regulations on plants with foreign genetic material. That would be a major boon to cacao farmers, helping remove both cost and regulatory barriers, according to Penn State team leader Mark Guiltinan.

"Our approach could solve both of those problems," Guiltinan said, per the school's release. It also offers hope in other gene editing areas for a quicker, less onerous path to disease- and weather-resistant crops.

"We're not just creating better cacao plants — we're exploring how modern biotechnology can work within existing regulatory frameworks to address real-world agricultural challenges," Guiltinan said in the news release. "Traditional breeding approaches are slow, often taking decades to develop new resistant varieties."

For now, the gene-edited cacao plants need to be tested outside of the controlled greenhouse environment. Guiltinan and his fellow researchers are tinkering with genome editing and targeting different threats to make a second generation of cacao plants with even better disease resistance.

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The news for the chocolate industry is a welcome development, as businesses and scientists grapple with crop shortages. Beyond gene editing, entrepreneurs are developing chocolate substitutes to help create eco-friendly solutions. Scientists are also using satellite technology to help optimize current growing regions.

The Penn State team's head-on approach is potentially the most exciting remedy yet.

"For the millions of farmers who depend on cacao cultivation and the billions who enjoy chocolate, this research offers hope for a more sustainable and secure future — one precise genetic edit at a time," Guiltinan concluded.

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