Using CRISPR to engineer a relative of the tomato, biologists have created a fruit that is easier to grow, potentially opening the door to breeding plants that are resistant to disease, pests or drought. In a recent study, scientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (NY, USA), Johns Hopkins University (MD, USA) and the Boyce Thompson Institute (NY, USA) have used CRISPR gene editing to create goldenberries that are more suited to large-scale farming. Bypassing the traditional, long-winded breeding process, they provide more resilient food crops that could help expand dietary diversity. The goldenberry (Physalis peruviana), with its sweet, yellow-orange berries, is a minor crop cultivated in limited geographical regions. Native to South America, the fruit is a member of the Solanaceae or nightshade family, which also includes potatoes and tomatoes. It is said to taste like pineapple and mango and is nutritionally rich, often touted as a superfood, giving it great potential as a global crop. However, the plants have undergone little domestication, and as such are large and unruly, making them unmanageable for large-scale production. Improving their growth habit to rectify this could put these berries on the menu in many more places and therefore have a positive impact on dietary diversification. Previous work in sister species, tomatoes and groundcherries, has demonstrated that genome-editing technologies like CRISPR can be used to produce more compact plants by engineering mutations in the ERECTA gene, which regulates stem length. Building on this work, the researchers applied the same strategy to target tetraploid…
