The groundcherry might look at first like a purely ornamental plant. A member of the genus Physalis, it bears papery, heart-shaped husks that resemble Chinese lanterns. (The plant popularly known as the Chinese lantern is a close cousin.) Within each groundcherry casing is a small, tart, edible fruit, similar in appearance to a cherry tomato, that is sometimes sold at farmer’s markets.

The fruit might be more common in supermarkets were it not so difficult to grow in large quantities. Groundcherry bushes sprawl untidily and can drop their fruits early, and the plants possess other undesirable traits. Diminishing these traits through selective breeding would take years.

On Monday, however, a team of researchers reported that, by removing certain portions of the plant’s DNA using common gene-editing techniques, they’ve produced a groundcherry with a larger fruit and a more ordered bush, greatly speeding the process of domestication. Their work, which appeared in the journal Nature Plants, is part of a scientific initiative called the Physalis Improvement Project.

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Groundcherries are related to tomatoes, which have a well-studied genome. Joyce Van Eck, a plant geneticist at Cornell University and the Boyce Thompson Institute and an author of the paper, and her colleagues had already discovered that, using Crispr, a gene-editing technique that can snip out portions of the genome, they could alter a specific tomato gene and produce plants that produced flowers more quickly.