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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: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday October 02 2018, @08:49PM (3 children)
Strawberries, like tomatos, used to have a taste or flavor before they were "improved" for supermarkets. I'm old enough to remember tasty strawberries and tomatoes. I'm told chicken used to have a flavor in the old days; I don't remember that must have been before my time.
I wonder if this cherry thingie will have any taste other than sweetness after its been "improved".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @09:23PM
As mentioned elsewhere, they are a weed in much of the US. If you plant them they will self-seed for years to come given no untimely frosts or drought.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @09:49PM
they still have taste. Grow them yourself. Stop buying and whining.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @01:59AM
If your chicken doesn't have flavor it's because you're cooking it wrong and probably using boneless/skinless white meat.
I buy the cheap non-frozen value pack thighs and it tastes delicious. Heat an oven safe skillet on the stove-top while the oven is heating to 350F, sear the bottom of the chicken while you season the top and season the bottom while you sear the top, then flip it right-side up and put it in the oven for 27-33 minutes (depending on oven, sear time, thickness, and preference). It's just two minutes of hands-on time and $0.65/pound.