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Consider the groundcherry. Unlike its relative, the tomato, the groundcherry has never been fully domesticated. The plant’s sprawling growth and habit of dropping its small orange fruits on the ground before they’re ripe make it an awkward crop to cultivate, and its commercial presence is mostly limited to farmers’ markets.
But Joyce Van Eck of the Boyce Thompson Institute in Ithaca, New York, and Zach Lippman of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory are working to change that. Because they don’t have the option of domesticating the groundcherry over thousands of years of selective breeding, as agriculturists did with tomato plants, the researchers are using CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology to reproduce some of the tomato’s domestication-associated genetic changes. The pair recently used CRISPR to mutate the groundcherry equivalent of the tomato’s SELF-PRUNING gene, to try to rein in the groundcherry’s sprawling shoots (Nat Plants, 4:766–70, 2018). They’ve also edited ...
