WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 (Xinhua) -- Fruit eaters may have another cherries on their plates other than strawberries, blueberries and blackberries as American scientists used genomics and gene editing to rapidly domesticate a wild fruit called "groundcherry."
The study published on Monday in the journal Nature Plants described a shortcut around traditional breeding techniques, making a little-known fruit about the size of a marble the agriculture's next big berry crop.
Groundcherries, also called "husk cherries" and "strawberry tomatoes," are appealing candidates because they are drought tolerant and have an enticing flavor, according to the study.
"You have to taste the fruit to fully grasp its complexity," said Zachary Lippman, a plant scientists at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Lippman described the fruit, native to Central and South America, as tropical yet sour, sometimes with hints of vanilla.
The groundcherry belongs to a group of plants known as orphan crops, which are grown as small-scale crops, regionally, or for subsistence.
It could have taken a decade to thousands of years to domesticate a crop from the wild, according to Lippman. But the scientists laid out how genome editing could give those orphan crops like the groundcherry an agricultural advantage.
To make its weedy shape more compact, its fruits larger, and its flowers more prolific, they used a three-pronged approach: the team sequenced a sampling of the groundcherry's genome, figured out how to use the genome editing tool CRISPR in the plant, and identified the genes underlying the groundcherry's undesirable traits.
The team is improving and manipulating additional characteristics like fruit color and flavor, but they cannot say exactly when the fruit might make it to market.
Lippman hoped his team's work would inspire researchers to examine other orphan crops with well-studied relatives and consider how those crops, too, have potential for rapid domestication.
