Seedless Blackberries and Cherries That Grow on Bushes Vie to Be the Future of Food
If you wanted to create better blackberries, you could try to breed a variety without the seeds that get stuck in your teeth. Or one without the thorns that make the berries hard to pick. Or you could aim for more environmentally efficient plants that produce more berries per acre with less water and fewer chemicals.
With decades of work and a fair amount of luck, you might achieve one of those goals.
But a North Carolina startup called Pairwise is using the gene-editing technology called Crispr to try to achieve all those goals at once, crafting seedless, thornless, higher-yielding blackberry plants—and in a matter of years rather than decades.
That’s the promise of modern genomics: introducing speed, precision, and the ability to solve multiple problems at once to the glacially slow, haphazard, one-tweak-at-a-time world of crop breeding.
Pairwise’s triple-threat berries won’t be in US groceries before 2030—even turbo-charged breeding...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to wired.com. To see the full text click HERE
