Domesticating tomatoes took millennia - we can now redo it in 3 years

It took at least 3000 years to domesticate the tomato. Now two separate teams in Brazil and China have done it all over again in less than three years – only better in some ways, as the redomesticated tomatoes are more nutritious than the ones we eat now.

This approach, which relies on the revolutionary CRISPR genome editing technique, could not only improve existing crops, it could also be used to turn thousands of wild plants into far more useful and appealing crops. In fact, a third team in the…