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The taming of the shrub

Nature Plants volume 4, pages 742–743 (2018)Cite this article

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Can genomics, functional analysis and genome editing help build the bridge between orphan crops and modern agriculture?

The availability of genomic information and efficient genome editing tools represents a novel opportunity for crop domestication and improvement2,4. Wild species and unimproved orphan crops can now, in theory, be modified rapidly and in a targeted manner, to provide novel and improved crops. Consider groundcherry (P. pruinosa), a solanaceous species that produces a small, but tasty berry. A garden curiosity5, groundcherry cannot be grown on an agricultural scale because of wild characteristics such as sprawling habit, small, husked fruit and strong fruit abscission. The growth habit and production of small fruits unsuited for agriculture resemble the characteristics of the wild ‘currant’ tomato Solanum pimpinellifolium, which was domesticated to become tomato. Lemmon and co-workers saw an opportunity: would modification of the known gene targets of tomato domestication achieve corresponding gains in this sister species? Through gene editing, they targeted repressors of the florigen pathway to increase flower numbers and delimit flowering time, both on primary and axillary shoots. Knockout of SELF-PRUNING, a classical improvement gene that controls indeterminate versus determinate growth in tomato, was too severe to be useful, resulting in extreme compactness. Knockout of another florigen repressor, SP5G, resulted in increased axillary flowering, although caused no changes to the primary shoot; nonetheless, fruit density increased. The authors next targeted the CLAVATA pathway, which regulates shoot apical meristem size by the interaction of a small peptide, CLV3, with its receptors (CLV1 and others). Knockout of CLV1 resulted in increased flower meristem size, additional flower organs and conversion from two-locule to a larger, three-locule fruit. These manipulations produced variants better suited to, although well short of, full agricultural exploitation and constitute an impressive demonstration of what is possible through a combination of genomics and gene editing of just a small number of loci.

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Fig. 1: The process of domestication.

References

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  1. Department of Plant Biology and Genome Center, University of California Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Luca Comai

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  1. Luca Comai
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Correspondence to Luca Comai.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Comai, L. The taming of the shrub. Nature Plants 4, 742–743 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-018-0275-x

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