---
title: "Miami 17-year-old co-invents a patented heme tomato; its 10 US claims cover soy genes, not taste yet"
url: https://badiyaa.com/gabriella-rothberg-heme-tomato-patent/
published: 2026-10-16T16:40:00+01:00
modified: 2026-10-16T15:18:33+01:00
section: Science
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# Miami 17-year-old co-invents a patented heme tomato; its 10 US claims cover soy genes, not taste yet

US Patent 12,668,806 pairs a soybean leghemoglobin gene with a pollen-blocking gene for hybrid seed, granted 242 days after filing, with no heme or iron data yet.

A US patent granted on June 30, 2026, lists Gabriella Rothberg, a 17-year-old from Miami, as co-inventor of a tomato engineered to carry a soybean heme gene. Patent 12,668,806, assigned to her company Impossible Vines Inc., contains 10 claims, and every one of them rests on a single DNA package that pairs a heme-producing gene with a gene that stops the plant making working pollen.

Heme is the iron-carrying molecule that helps give meat its flavor. Putting it inside a fruit, rather than adding it to a processed patty, is the idea she says began at 15, when she was making a sandwich for her father and wondered whether a vegetable could taste like meat without being turned into a meat substitute.

## How the 10 claims build a heme tomato

The patent text names the parts. The heme gene is leghemoglobin from *Glycine max*, the soybean, rewritten (codon-optimized, meaning its DNA spelling is adjusted to suit the host plant) and driven by the cauliflower mosaic virus 35S promoter, a genetic switch that keeps a gene on in most tissues. The second gene is barnase, a pollen-killing enzyme from the bacterium *Bacillus amyloliquefaciens*, switched on only in the anthers, the flower parts that make pollen. A hygromycin-resistance gene lets technicians pick out cells that took up the DNA.

The DNA goes in through *Agrobacterium*, a soil bacterium that plant scientists routinely use to ferry genes into plant cells. The document lists the heirloom tomatoes Rutgers, Brandywine and Marglobe, plus three eggplants, as candidates. Claim 10 covers the commercial payoff: because the engineered plant cannot pollinate itself, crossing it with a normal tomato yields seed that is all first-generation (F1) hybrid, without workers removing stamens from each flower by hand.

In an interview published on October 13, she put the goal plainly: “So you’ll bite into a tomato, and it’ll taste like a hamburger.” She also credited software for much of the paperwork and design: “AI has helped me build the constructs for this heme gene that I want to integrate into the tomato plant.”

## A 606-day path from first filing to grant

The record shows a quick run through the US Patent and Trademark Office:

- November 1, 2024: provisional application filed, setting the priority date

- October 31, 2025: full application US 19/376,424 filed by Impossible Vines

- May 7, 2026: application published as US 2026/0125693

- June 30, 2026: patent granted, 242 days after the full filing

- October 31, 2045: anticipated expiration

That works out to 606 days, roughly 20 months, from priority date to grant, and about 19 years of protection left from the grant date. The co-inventor on the record is her father, Jonathan M. Rothberg.

## Why soy leghemoglobin already has a US track record

The molecule is not new to American food. In nature, [leghemoglobin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leghemoglobin) sits in the nitrogen-fixing root nodules of legumes, where it holds oxygen at low levels so the nitrogen-fixing enzyme can work. It weighs about 16 kilodaltons, carries one iron-bound heme, and differs from animal hemoglobin at about 80% of its amino-acid positions despite a shared ancestor.

Impossible Foods makes a soy leghemoglobin preparation in a yeast, *Pichia pastoris*. Under [FDA GRAS notice 737](https://www.hfpappexternal.fda.gov/scripts/fdcc/index.cfm?set=GRASNotices&id=737), the agency closed its review on July 23, 2018, with no questions about use at up to 0.8% leghemoglobin protein in ground beef analogues meant to be cooked, while noting that some uses may need a separate color additive listing. That listing followed in July 2019 and survived a court challenge in May 2021.

The difference here is location. The 2018 notice covers a yeast-made ingredient added to meat analogues; the new patent aims to have the tomato plant make the protein itself.

## What the patent does not yet show

A patent grant is a legal decision about novelty, not a peer-reviewed result, and this one reports no taste or iron data. Its examples describe how heme and iron would be checked, by chromatography and spectrophotometry against unmodified plants, and how male sterility would be confirmed under a microscope. The only experimental image is of control tomato cotyledons, seed leaves, forming callus, the clump of undifferentiated cells that precedes new shoots, after 4 weeks.

Three further gaps stand out. None of the 10 claims covers flavor or nutrition outcomes, only the DNA, cells, methods and hybrid seed. The document also outlines raising lycopene, the red tomato pigment, but those methods are not among the granted claims. And whether the fruit could deliver meaningful absorbable iron, which Rothberg hopes could help pregnant women where meat is scarce, depends on test results that do not exist yet.

The patent’s own next step, Example 6, is greenhouse and field trials measuring yield, flavor and nutrients against wild-type controls. On October 12, Rothberg posted that one plant “once began as a tissue-cultured explant back in June” and is now growing in soil.

## Further reading

- [Wikipedia: Leghemoglobin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leghemoglobin)

- [FDA: GRAS Notice 737, soy leghemoglobin](https://www.hfpappexternal.fda.gov/scripts/fdcc/index.cfm?set=GRASNotices&id=737)

*Image: Kolforn, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*