Earth cherries, the latest modified fruit scientists want you to try

It can have a taste of pineapple but also vanilla. It is presented as "tropical" but also has nuances of tomato. Researchers say its smell can be "intoxicating", but you probably never heard of it.

It's called a cherry, and if scientists want, you can find it in grocery stores in the United States in a few years.

The fruit is about the size of a marble and is sometimes found in Central and South America. But few in the United States have ever tasted. It is difficult to cultivate, often falling to the ground before being fully mature, hence its name. And while peanuts are high in vitamins, protein and fiber, they are not as sweet as other popular fruits such as strawberries.

With the help of gene editing, all this could change. According to a study published Monday in Nature Plants, researchers made peanuts larger and easier to grow than those found in nature. They hope someday to domesticate the fruits and bring them to the American market.

"We've targeted the genes we knew from our experience, which could make the plant more compact and easier to manage," said Joyce Van Eck, a researcher at Boyce Thompson Institute, an independent Cornell University affiliate. "The farmers said," If you can just get them to behave, we will grow acres. "

His team looked at tomatoes, grown for thousands of years, and identified changes in their genes that made their domestication possible. They then used CRISPR, a gene editing technique, to make similar changes to the DNA of fungi.

For example, a mutation in a certain tomato gene makes the fruit particularly easy to grow, so the researchers forced the same mutation into the peanuts.

"When you change the gene, it basically shrinks the plant like an accordion, so you can make it much more compact," said Zachary Lippman, an investigator from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Cold Spring Harbor Lab.

With other genetic modifications, the researchers managed to produce plants that produced 50% more graters on any stem, and these fruits were larger – weighing up to 24% more than traditional unmodified versions. In the future, the team is working to improve the color and taste of yellowish fruits to make them more attractive to consumers.

Researchers hope that improved peanuts will one day reflect the economic success of foods such as quinoa, grown in South America as an "orphan crop" before "emerging on the mass market a few years ago," according to Lippman. .

Despite its ubiquity in supermarkets and fast food restaurants, even quinoa could benefit from some genetic modification, Lippman said.

"There have been crosses for quinoa and there are different varieties of quinoa," he said. "But it's a great example of what could be further improved with gene editing."

Lippman also notes that humans have been eating genetically modified crops for millennia, selectively selecting fruits and vegetables with the most favorable traits.

"We have been eating mutations in plants and animals since humans began to improve crops thousands of years ago," he said. "It's a random process that has lasted for thousands of years. With gene editing, you only make one mutation on a gene in the simplest sense. "

Van Eck said the land cherry, which can sometimes be seen at local farmers' markets in the US, is "very refreshing," but his team hopes to apply the techniques to other plants. "We rely on a handful of major food crops," she said, and need to "diversify our diets."

"If you think of farming in the future, we need more tools in our toolbox," Lippman said. "And the more cultures we have, the more power we have to respond to needs."

Marion Nestlé, professor emeritus at New York University, who studies nutrition, food studies and public health, said: "It's a fascinating technical problem and it's interesting to see what can be done. "

She noted, however, that broader issues such as hunger in the world can not always be solved in the laboratory and are often caused by the inability to access food because of transportation or conflict. "These are social, economic and political problems," she said, "and they need social, economic and political solutions."

Although this does not solve the problem of hunger in the world, the cherry of land deserves to be tasted.