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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 edIII on Wednesday October 03 2018, @01:46AM
I would say those deniers have been pilloried when they're clearly shills for corporations. Show me a true scientist performing real research (not junk science funded by Big Oil), that puts forth a valid argument, with data and reproducible results, and is PILLORIED, and I will agree that an injustice was performed. However, most of the time, the majority of people screaming the loudest, also strangely have the most to lose financially. I think it's justified pillory when you're a billionaire arguing against clean air and water rules, and you form a quasi-scientific foundation with conclusions in hand looking for scientists to work backwards from that. Unjustified when you're a scientist, not using Big Oil money, having produced legitimate science and results that can be reviewed scientifically. Like I said though, point me to that science. I will forever be skeptical of research that absolves very rich monied interests of expensive responsibility, when said monied interests fund and operate said research. Human nature is a bitch, but only the foolish would forget that.
Additionally, there is some room for argument in Climate Science. What fucking room is there for argument when Big Pharma is caught playing math games with people's lives? You seem to act like corporations haven't been caught being highly reckless with consumer safety in the pursuit of the almighty dollar. When presented with research that might put profits at risk, completely coincidentally, those corporations fight back very hard with their own science, that completely coincidentally, challenges the science proving the product is bad for us. Science related to lead when we are arguing about lead in the environment and hugely rich monied interests are putting lead into the environment. Repeat with Tobacco, etc.
I said I don't trust the scientists, I didn't say I didn't trust science itself. Scientists are human after all, which means they suffer from the same sociopathic drawbacks due to money and resources that everyone apparently does. That includes performing research where the safety may be questionable, but a non-scientist gets involved, puts pressure on the scientists (or engineers), and the product gets pushed through to the market anyways.
You're damn right I don't trust scientists working for Big Ag trying to bring a new product to market. There is hardly any science in it, and pretty much 99.99999999999% executive and shareholder avarice that substitutes knowledge based decision making with wallet based decision making. The latter has very few rules, the primary being: Money = Good = Right.
In such an environment why should I be pilloried for daring to have mistrust in such groups of individuals proven to have bad behavior? For the record, I believe man has affected the environment and that climate science is telling us to change soon. I also believe that a lot of supporting research may be questionable, that some of it has been faked, and there is a grab for power inside the climate science movement.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.