SoylentNews

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