You may soon be able to eat a new fruit developed by scientists, called "fruits of the earth" | Simplemost

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

This is called a shrimp and if scientists do, 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 can sometimes be found in Central America and South America. In the United States, few have ever tasted it. It is difficult to cultivate, often falling to the ground before being fully mature, hence its name. And although the fruits of the earth contain a lot of vitamins, proteins and fiber, they are not as sweet as other popular fruits such as strawberries.

Come to an American market

With the help of gene editing, all this could change. According to a study published Oct. 1 in Nature Plants, researchers made grapes larger and easier to grow than those found in the wild. They hope someday to domesticate the fruit and bring it to the American market.

"We have targeted genes that, in our experience, could make the plant more compact and manageable," said Joyce Van Eck, a researcher at the Boyce Thompson Institute, an independent university affiliate. Cornell. "Farmers said," If you can just get them to behave, we'll grow acres. "

His team is interested in tomatoes, grown for thousands of years, and has identified changes in their genes that have 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. The researchers have therefore forced the same mutation in the fruits of the earth.

"When you modify the gene, it shrinks the plant in the manner of an accordion, which allows you to make it much more compact," said Zachary Lippman, an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. , who co-directed the study.

Thanks to other genetic modifications, the researchers were able to create plants whose stem gave 50% more ground cherries, and these fruits were bigger – weighing 24% more than the unmodified traditional versions. In the future, the team is working to improve the color and taste of yellowish fruits to make them more appealing to consumers.

The success of Groundcherry

Researchers hope that improved varieties of ground cherries will one day reflect the economic success of foods such as quinoa, grown as an "orphan crop" in South America before "appearing on the mass market two years ago. ", according to Lippman.

Despite its ubiquity in fast-paced supermarkets and restaurants, even quinoa could benefit from some genetic alterations, Lippman said.

"There have been crossings for quinoi and there are different varieties of quinoï," 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 plants for millennia, selectively selecting fruits and vegetables with the most favorable characteristics.

"We have been eating mutations in plants and animals since humans began to improve their crops thousands of years ago," he said. "It's a random process and it took 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 on local farmers markets in the US, is "very refreshing," but his team hopes to apply the techniques to other plants. "We rely on only a handful of major food crops," she said, and we need to "diversify our diet."

"If you're thinking of agriculture for 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. "

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

Although this does not solve the problem of hunger in the world, the cherry could be worth it.

Written by Arman Azad for CNN.

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