Capsicum vs Beyond Peppers
Engineering capsaicinoids inside a chili plant is the easy case — the pathway is already there, we are just rewriting it. Engineering the same pathway into another crop is the Beyond Peppers program, a clean four-tier difficulty gradient.
The gradient
Difficulty scales with evolutionary distance. The closer the host is to Capsicum, the more of the upstream pathway is already present and the smaller the construct needs to be. The further the host, the more of the pathway we have to carry over as a complete module.
Capsicum (Pepper tier)
100 – 2,940,000 SHUHosts: C. annuum, C. chinense, C. frutescens, C. baccatum, C. pubescens
The pathway is native. Every substrate, cofactor, and transporter is already present. Design reduces to tuning promoter strength and swapping in redesigned Pun1 variants.
Close Solanaceae
500 – 10,000 SHUHosts: Tomato, tomatillo, eggplant, potato, petunia, tobacco
Shared family, deep synteny, vanillin-arm precursors already present. Add Pun1 + pAMT + a branched-acyl supply pair under a fruit-specific promoter.
Fruits and vegetables
500 – 50,000 SHUHosts: Berries, stone fruit, apples, melons, cucurbits, brassicas, roots, leafy greens
Non-Solanaceae but still dicot. Need full six-gene module and host-matched codon optimization. Flux-balance ceilings vary by tissue type.
Herbs, specialty crops, trees
500 – 20,000 SHUHosts: Basil, mint, hops, tea, coffee, cocoa, vanilla, almond, walnut, fig
Smaller target tissues, slower regeneration cycles, often perennial. Design is manageable; propagation and field validation take longer.
Grains and distant hosts
500 – 20,000 SHUHosts: Rice, wheat, oat, barley, corn, sorghum, sugarcane, soybean, peanut
Monocots or evolutionarily distant dicots. No background pathway activity. Full six-gene cassette plus a vanillin-shunt bridge. The Golden Rice precedent applies.
Non-food and specialty
Varies SHUHosts: Model organisms, ornamentals, biosynthesis chassis
Research-tier products, not food targets. Used as validation hosts for new pathway modules before moving them into commercial Tier 1–4 crops.
Why the gradient matters
Difficulty determines license pricing and timeline. Pepper and Tier 1 products ship as licensed designs today with short field-trial timelines. Tier 3 and Tier 4 products require longer development on the licensee side; Genome or Platform licensing is typical. See the agricultural biotech case study for how a Genome deal structures those timelines, and can you engineer rice to be spicy for a deep-dive on Tier 4.
What stays constant
The design stack. Every tier uses the same six-stage pipeline — see how we design. Only the shape and size of the output construct changes.