When the ancient Americans first engineered the genome of the tomato thousands of years ago, they selected strains of the wild plant that produced bigger fruit.

When geneticists recently edited the same genome, they pushed the plant to produce bigger fruit by growing larger flowers, a simple modification that could be applied to a number of key crops, including corn. Though it’s just one experiment on one crop, the findings could offer a new—and, in a way, time-tested—approach to improve yields.

While many people consider tomatoes a vegetable, botanically speaking, they are a fruit, or seed-bearing structures that are produced when a flower is pollinated. Flowers develop from a specific part of the plant, known as the meristem. In the meristem, a pathway known as CLV regulates flower growth. Messing with that pathway can either limit or encourage certain parts of of that process, making the flowers smaller or larger depending on the modification.

Elizabeth Pennisi, writing for Science, explains further: