This dark fruit may soon be as common as tomatoes | MNN

Tired of the same old product options in your local supermarket? A new fruit could soon become as common as tomatoes or strawberries, thanks to the CRISPR edition of the genome that can speed up the domestication of previously obscure wild plants.

Get acquainted with the earth cherry (Physalis pruinosa), sometimes called "inshell cherry", a plant from Central America and South America belonging to the Solanaceae family (alongside the tomato, potato and eggplant) and characterized by its outer shell and its tropical fruit with vanilla. Chances are, you have not tasted one yourself … not yet anyway.

However, this could soon change after new revolutionary gene editing experiments that turn this unmanageable crop into a more agriculturally viable and savory crop.

"I am firmly convinced that with the right approach, the earth cherry could become an important berry crop," said Zachary Lippman, plant scientist and principal investigator at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, in a press release. .

The key to their approach is a technology known as CRISPR, a revolutionary gene editing method that has the power to speed up the process of domestication. What once took generations could only take a few years.

Wild cherry already has an attractive taste, but it tends to be a little acidic. Nor is it an ideal crop, growing fruit individually rather than in clusters. The background colors edited by CRISPR have already been corrected for these characters; the fruits are denser, more fleshy and have more seeded sections. They also stay longer on the vine and ripen more regularly.

"This is very good evidence that with gene editing, you can consider integrating other wild plants or orphan crops into agricultural production," said Lippman. "The more arrows we have in our quivers to meet the needs of agriculture in the future, the better we will be."

As for how the fruit could be used to brighten up your dishes, the tomato could be its closest analogue. Imagine a pasta sauce with wild berries or even a caprese with wild fruits. Martha Stewart apparently has a recipe that suggests to sprinkle them with olive oil. There is no doubt that home chefs of the future will offer countless creative ways to use it.

And pottery is only the beginning. Lippman and his colleagues are already studying other wild crops that could be modified in the same way.

"It's about demonstrating what is now possible," he said.

In relation with MNN:

This dark fruit may soon be as common as tomatoes

The CRISPR gene modification allows scientists to make wild fruits such as cherries more agriculturally viable.