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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: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday October 02 2018, @08:18PM (5 children)
My concern about most GMO foods is that their genes aren't modified to benefit the people who eat them, but so that Monsanto can move RoundUp.
RoundUp kills _every_ form of plant life that it comes into contact with other than that grown from RoundUp-Ready seed such as 90% of America's soy and corn.
Real soil is quite complex; plants need more than just potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen. Chemical fertilizer all by itself causes significant trouble in that it often causes algae bloom in waterways that consumes all the oxygen, thereby killing all the fish.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @10:27PM (1 child)
Fuck off, moron. RoundUp does not kill every form of plant life. Get an education you stupid cunt.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @01:26PM
Wow, I've never looked at it from that angle before. Thanks, you've convinced me!
(Score: 5, Touché) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday October 02 2018, @11:12PM (2 children)
I'm sorry, this is incorrect. I've hacked out far too much pigweed and crabgrass to let that BS pass unchallenged.
If the greenies would have a brief moment of clarity they'd take a look at the real impact of no-till farming that Glyphosphate has enabled. The farms that switched to no-till in the 90s have double-digit organic matter percentages in their soil now. That's good enough to grow vegetables in. Plowpans that needed industrial equipment to break up are just gone. It's a no-shit honest to god miracle.
No-till with herbicides is orders of magnitude better than flipping over the dirt with a moldboard plow and letting it erode all winter long. That's the "old fashioned way" that people want us to go back to. If you understand even a modicum of soil science you'll get why that is a very bad thing. If you hate Bayer, that's fine. I get that. Go invent an alternative herbicides then. Don't FUD away one of the best technologies of the 20th century because you don't like them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @01:36PM (1 child)
I'm a scientist, and I will admit up front that I am one who doesn't understand even a modicum of soil science. What's the time for the soil organic matter to reach steady state using the "old fashioned" method. Are we talking about needing to turn the soil for a few seasons before the soil hits double-digit organic matter whereas with Roundup you can do it in one or two? Once you've achieved the level of organic matter in the soil you need, does it matter which method you use from there on out? If not, then I would think the old fashioned way is better long-term because it doesn't promote reliance on monocultures. Does Roundup have an adverse affect on the other parts of soil chemistry that are important, such as the microflora?
(Score: 1) by MindEscapes on Wednesday October 03 2018, @03:14PM
Turning large amounts of soil over as the old furrow plows do leads to massive soil erosion. The good soil blows away, gets washed away by rain and simply is no more. It isn't about the time it takes to build up organic reserve.
The concepts behind no till is to leave the weeds grow in place through the "off season", don't break up the soil and their roots which will prevent the erosion, spray them just before planting with a seed drill (shoots seeds to predetermined depth into a small gap made in the soil), and allow the crop plant roots to take hold and continue holding the soil in place. Vastly reduced soil erosion and therefore has a chance to increase organic matter levels over time.
Or so I understand it to be.
Need a break? mindescapes.net may be for you!