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CRISPR editing may help turn a wild berry into a farmable crop
It can take many years to make a wild plant easy to farm, but gene editing could make that happen for one fruit in record time. Scientists have used genomics and CRISPR gene editing to develop a technique that could domesticate the groundcherry, a wild fruit that's tasty and drought-resistant but difficult to grow in significant volumes. After sequencing the groundcherry's genome, the team both tweaked CRISPR to work with the plant and pinpointed the genes that led to its less-than-pleasant traits, such as its small size and not-so-plentiful flowering. From there, they just had to 'fix' the fruit with gene edits that promoted the qualities they wanted.
