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Meet the Ground Cherry, a CRISPR Creation That Could Be the Next Strawberry
Before corn was corn, it was a skinny grass that produced only a single row of kernels on each stalk. Long centuries of breeding turned it into a fast-growing plant with big, sweet, kernel-dense ears. In fact, most of the produce we're familiar with now took hundreds of generations to become what they are today. But now scientists, armed with powerful CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology, are whittling down the domestication process to just a few years. Their first experiment is the ground cherry — a formerly wild, now-delicious fruit that has everything it takes to become the next strawberry.
In a paper [DOI: 10.1038/s41477-018-0259-x] [DX] published Monday in the journal Nature Plants, a team of researchers outlined how they used CRISPR to make the ground cherry (Physalis pruinosa) more suitable for agriculture. The sweet, tropical-flavored fruit, about the size of a cherry and nestled in a protective papery husk, is known as an "orphan crop" — one with some desirable characteristics but not enough to make farmers want to grow them. In the wild, the ground cherry is, well, wild — it grows all over the place and has small, sparse fruits that fall off the vine when they're ripe.
But by using CRISPR to edit out its unattractive elements, scientists think it may eventually be found in the produce section of the supermarket. "With some improvements, maybe it could become a specialty fruit crop in the United States and give farmers another fruit crop to grow that's not a tree," Joyce Van Eck, Ph.D., a plant biotechnology expert at the Boyce Thompson Institute and one of the paper's co-authors, tells Inverse.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday October 02 2018, @05:47PM (6 children)
Mom used to grow them in the garden, and would make jam out of them. Or we'd eat them straight off the plant.
What they mean is that it might not be suitable for factory farming.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday October 02 2018, @06:39PM (1 child)
I grow them every year -- they're amazing. They look like small tomatillos but they are sweet and tart, firm and juicy, the seeds are so tiny and you barely notice them. And you really only need to plant them once -- they self-seed from fallen fruits so well, I basically have to CNC-style garden them (remove them from everywhere I want to plant other things and leave them only where I want them to grow).
Ground cherries are like candy. If you have a garden, grow them. You will be addicted.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday October 02 2018, @07:41PM
Ditto. They're amazing as jams and pie filling. They do require a lot of water though.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by J053 on Tuesday October 02 2018, @07:54PM (2 children)
(Score: 3, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday October 02 2018, @08:17PM (1 child)
It looks like these are what we know as "cape gooseberries".
I have one plant that limped through the winter, and it is beginning to grow a couple of tiny fruit now. It's not the birds who eat them though, my tiny dog loves them.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @09:16PM
However they are similar. I believe they are more closely related to tomatillos than any of the others.
Another one to look into is 'Otricoli Orange Berries' (There appear to be multiple plants called simply 'Orange Berries'), which are a cherry tomato relative that was found near Rome. I don't know the original origins of them, but they are small, seedy and range from tasting very tomato-like to very citrus-y depending on when you harvest them. Like ground cherries, tomatillos, cherry tomatoes, and cape gooseberries, they only need to be planted once in a well watered area, although many of these plants are not surviving in California even as seedlings due to the severe drought in some parts of the state.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 02 2018, @08:39PM
It's not just factory farming... you've got to be able to efficiently pick, pack, ship, and shelf-life them, and after all that they've got to compete with the existing choices in the produce section on price and attractiveness.
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