“The tomato has the genes,” said Zsögön. “You just need to activate them in the right order in the right places.”

Rather than splice new genes into the tomatoes, researchers would need only activate existing genes using gene-editing tools like TALENs or the well-known CRISPR/Cas9. The tomato could itself become a factory for producing capsaicinoids, or, yes, companies could just market spicy tomatoes.

Should we do this? Not today—Zsögön pointed out that there are still questions about whether CRISPR/Cas9 can unintentionally edit other, unintended parts of genomes, an issue that would naturally need to be worked out first. But engineering tomatoes to be spicy could be “the next step in the fascinating story of pungent crops,” according to the paper.