The males of plants as diverse as cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, tomato, and rice can be made sterile by deleting a very small part of their genome’s DNA. This is the take-home message of a paper published in the journal Nature Communications in October by researchers at the State Key Laboratory of Vegetable Biobreeding of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing.

The simple deletion resulting in such a drastic outcome brings to mind the story of a kingdom that was lost for want of a horseshoe nail. But here, instead of loss, the researchers assure us of a gain: that the deletion could lead to an abundant harvest of these plants, thanks to a process called heterosis.

The DNA molecule consists of two long strands. Each strand is composed of four compounds called nucleotide bases. They are designated A, C, G, and T for simplicity (for adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine respectively)…