Since agriculture began roughly 10,000 years ago, farmers have repeatedly saved seeds from the tastiest, largest, and hardiest plants to grow the next season’s crops. Over centuries — and often millennia — that steady selection has shaped most of the fruits and vegetables we eat today.
Now plant biologists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) say they may have found a faster path. Using the gene-editing tool CRISPR, they’re working with goldenberry — a small tomato relative — to streamline traits that typically take years of breeding to achieve. The approach could make goldenberry easier to cultivate and potentially viable for large-scale production in the U.S. and beyond. More broadly, CRISPR-edited crops could help breeders respond faster to emerging threats, from new diseases and pests to intensifying drought.
“By using CRISPR, you open up paths to new and more resilient food options,” said Blaine Fitzgerald, the greenhouse technician in CSHL’s Zachary Lippman lab. “In an era of climate change and increasing population size, bringing innovation to agricultural production is going to be a huge path forward.”
The Lippman lab focuses on plants in the nightshade family — a group that includes major crops like tomatoes, eggplants, and potatoes, as well as lesser-known relatives such as goldenberry. Long cultivated in South America, goldenberries have been attracting wider attention for their nutritional value and their distinctive sweet-tart flavour. You may have even spotted them in your local supermarket, according to a press release.
Yet, goldenberry growers still rely on bushy crops that are “not really domesticated,” said Miguel Santo Domingo Martinez, the Lippman lab postdoc who led this study.
“These massive, sprawling plants in an agricultural setting are cumbersome for harvest,” Fitzgerald explained.
In earlier work, the Lippman lab used CRISPR to edit genes in tomatoes and another under-the-radar relative, groundcherry, to create more compact plants suited for urban farming. Building on that approach, the team targeted similar genes in goldenberry. The edited plants grew about 35% shorter — an advantage that could allow denser planting and make day-to-day maintenance easier. Next, the lab turned to an equally practical question: which goldenberries produce the best-tasting fruit. Fitzgerald said that involved eating “hundreds of them, walking a field, and trying fruit off every plant in the row.”
After breeding multiple generations of the most compact, best-tasting goldenberries, the team arrived at two distinct lines ready for further development. Although the fruits were slightly smaller, the researchers say future CRISPR edits could be used to enhance other desirable traits.
“We can try to target fruit size or disease resistance,” Santo Domingo said. “We can use these modern tools to domesticate undomesticated crops.” The team now hopes to seek additional regulatory approval for growers to get seeds and start producing the newly developed varieties.
