SoylentNews

CRISPR Could be Used to Transform the "Ground Cherry" Into a Crop for Farmers

posted by chromas on Tuesday October 02 2018, @05:17PM   
from the fruit-by-the-foot dept.

takyon writes:

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.

---

Original Submission

• Re:history of food (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @07:28PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @07:28PM (#743018)

  Also interesting to learn that sugar used to be considered a drug. It wasn't even considered relevant to fasting:

  In fact, Mintz quotes from Thomas
  Aquinas discussing the delicate issue of whether one could eat sweets during fast without
  breaking religious rules. The answer is very clearly in favor of sugar, thanks to its medical
  value:
  " Though they are nutritious themselves, sugared spices are nonetheless not eaten with
  the end in mind of nourishment, but rather for ease in digestion; accordingly, they do
  not break the fast any more than taking of any other medicine".

  https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4471-1429-1_6 [springer.com]

  Also, how all our food is dropping in mineral content since the soil has been so overused and people are excreting the minerals far away from the farms:

  Pronounced declines of Mg concentration in cereal grains have been reported over the past several decades, likely owing to yield dilution coupled with the Green Revolution [22], and mimicking the changes in concentrations of Zn, Fe, I, and vitamin A [23]. For example, Mg contents in wheat dropped an average of 19.6%, from a mean range of 115–126 mg per 100 g dry weight (DW) before 1968 to 91–101 mg per 100 g DW after 1968 [24], and a similar trend was reported by other authors [25], [26]. The declines in Mg, Zn, Fe, and I may also have some correlation with long-term unbalanced crop fertilization with nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) over the last decades.

  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221451411500121X [sciencedirect.com]

  Parent

  Starting Score:	0		points
  Moderation		+2
  Informative=2, Total=2
  Extra 'Informative' Modifier		0
  Total Score:		2