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

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday October 02 2018, @10:58PM (2 children)

    by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 02 2018, @10:58PM (#743110) Journal

    Burgess seed company used to give away small packets of these seeds with orders. I grew them out once. The are a small tangled branchy plant less than a foot tall. The fruit hides in leaf-colored papery husks that turn gold when they are ripe. The ones I had tasted like a cross between a peach and a pineapple. They were fantastic. I gave a few away to the early pickups at our CSA, but growing them at a larger scale would have been difficult. Harvesting the fruit was a hands-and-knees operation and they didn't all ripen at the same time. Being so low to the ground made them fodder for rabbits, raccoons, deer, etc. too.

    I've had the wild ones. They have a much sharper flavor that is more tangy, like a lime. Also they had thorns. I didn't care for those.

    You don't have to Crispr these to get a more commercial-able fruit. Selective breeding can do it; it just takes longer.

    IMHO honeyberries fall in this category of commercially-viable-if-you-make-it-work too. They are also delicious.

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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday October 03 2018, @12:29AM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 03 2018, @12:29AM (#743156) Journal

    You don't have to Crispr these to get a more commercial-able fruit. Selective breeding can do it; it just takes longer.

    Indeed, this is a point made in the summary above.

    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.

    They kind of spin it towards "gene editing is better," though, which isn't necessarily the case just because it is "faster."

  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday October 04 2018, @04:20AM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Thursday October 04 2018, @04:20AM (#743851) Journal

    Interesting -- the ones I grow (linked above) get about four feet tall. Those remind me of kiwi and while they have tartness, they don't have that "dissolve your teeth"level of acidity kiwis have.