Author: Tina Hesman Saey / Source: Science News
Gene editing can speed up plant domestication, taming wild vines, bushes and grasses and turning them into new crops.
Editing just two genes in ground cherries (Physalis pruinosa) produced plants that yielded more and bigger fruit, researchers report October 1 in Nature Plants. Those edits mimic changes that occurred in tomato plants during domestication, bringing the sweet tomato relative a step closer toward becoming a major berry crop, says study coauthor Zachary Lippman, a plant biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.
Ground cherries and their close relatives Cape gooseberries or golden berries (Physalis peruviana L.) are grown in many parts of the world, but have traits — such as dropping their fruit on the ground — that make them unattractive for large-scale agriculture.
“This is a really unruly plant with great potential,” says Harry Klee, a plant geneticist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. The new work serves as a how-to manual for others interested in rapidly domesticating new crops, he says.
Lippman, plant biologist Joyce Van Eck of Cornell University and their colleagues deciphered the ground cherry’s genetic instruction book, or genome, and looked for genes that give domestic tomatoes some of their characteristics. Cutting one gene called SELF-PRUNING 5G with the gene editor CRISPR/Cas9 created a mutation that caused the plants to stop making shoots and leaves and to instead produce more flowers and fruit.
The altered plants yielded 50 percent more fruit on each shoot than unaltered ground cherries. Snipping a second gene, CLV1, caused the…The post Gene editing can speed up plant domestication appeared first on FeedBox.