Genetics solves a thorny problem: how plants have prickles | Hacker News Reader

Genetics solves a thorny problem: how plants have prickles

cosmosmagazine.com

79 pointsgmays27 comments

The article mentions a peculiar fruit

> desert raisin (Solanum cleistogamum), an edible fruit native to central Australia

A thread on TropicalFruitForum called it "passionberry" and paraphrases "it's the best of the bush tomatoes, and one of the best fruity solanums in general, highly aromatic, with a smokey caramel/vanilla/banana-like flavor"

https://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=29434.0

Solanums hybridize pretty readily. I wonder if anyone's yet tried to hybridize one of these with tomatoes to get a better desert-adapted cultivar

There are thornless varieties of blackberries, but they taste awful compared to the real thing.

Hopefully this will allow to develop new thornless varieties that will duffer only in presence of thorns and not taste.

I have to disagree :)

It’s true that Marionberry is one of the most delicious as well as aggressively thorny, but there are many excellent thornless cultivars pioneered by the University of Arkansas, including Triple Crown and Prime Ark, as well as the series named after Native tribes, Apache, Navajo, Arapaho, which are among the sweetest.

Not to shit on other people's work, but I can't help to think that all this effort breeding cultivars of (very invasive) European blackberries could've been better spent further domesticating native species that indigenous peoples have often already partially domesticated. In fact some already exist.

Shouldn't we be focusing on plants that aren't a constant threat to native ecosystems?

Food crops aren't invasive species, if they were then we wouldn't have to put so much effort into farming them.

The Himalayan Blackberry (rubus armeniacus, native to Armenia and Iran) is definitely a damaging invasive species. Even if I have picked and eaten at least a quart of its yummy fruits in the last week, I’ve also spent untold hours pulling out its damn roots. It competes with English Ivy for the most murderous in crowding out other plant life around here.

Blackberries are definitely an invasive species, at least in Australia - you shouldn't eat wild ones because they're commonly sprayed with herbicides to try and control them.

There's like 5 people saying "blackberries". One example in one region does not make a trend.

But it makes a perfectly fine counterexample.

Blackberries can choke out entire hillsides and meadows. They're highly invasive in certain environments. There are other delicious invasives you be more familiar with like prickly pears (Mediterranean climates), ice plants (coastal scrublands), amaranth (everywhere), and dandelions (everywhere).

That's not really how that works. Certain crops are edible but we don't want them to spread too much because they easily overtake other, more fragile species. This applies to blackberries.

> Food crops aren't invasive species

Says who ?

> Rubus armeniacus ("Himalayan" blackberry) is considered a noxious weed and invasive species

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackberry

They can be an absolute menace when overgrown in a garden. And there's no way you're going to be able to pick the fruit from most of them when they're bunched up and taking dozens of square meters of land, only the ones on the outside layer.

You'll be able to get the fruit of the inner ones more easily if they don;t have thorns. You'll find pruning them easier also.

Blackberry is wildly invasive in the Pacific Northwest. It forms dense thickets that choke hillsides and watercourses, and interfere with the movement of wildlife.

It's a small perk that you can head out with a few bowls and fill them up with delicious berries in record time to make pies with. Besides that, they really do suck.

They do this in here in their natural range as well.

Is temporary. On their native areas they allow trees to grow, then the trees eventually grow over the bramble, take the place and blackberries leave. lots of animals big and small find refuge on those places. Is more a cure than a choke [on their native areas I repeat]. I hate to be attacked by the plant, but their utility for birds, insects and mammals can't be denied.

But If you want 'blackberries' on East USA the correct way is to use the totally equivalent black raspberry Rubus occidentalis that is an USA native, not so tall and has several good selections available. Look for Munger, Jewel or Blackhawk for example in your plant nursery. Easy fix and easier to harvest clean as it detaches from the peduncle.

Blackberry, mustard, mint, oat... I could go on

Can’t we have both? Refining existing stuff and digging up new stuff are both important ways to further the art.

Usually I'm the one making this argument to naysayers. But we're talking about plants of the same genus so there's definitely competition for market space, policy, funding, agricultural land, etc

Technically wouldn't any newly bred cultivar pretty much be an invasive species, should it be capable of surviving, competing with, and cross-breeding with its natural kin?

You are wrong in so many ways its hard to know where to start but no we 100% are not better off, "further domesticating native species that indigenous peoples have often already partially domesticated" a phrase that barely even makes sense in the context of the need for modern agriculture to feed 8 billion people.

I went a different way with it. I was thinking of how I could figure out how to grow thorns to keep ne'er-do-wells away

Have a look at the thorns on a honey locust.

I'm curious if they have a similar mechanism. They are very woody and oh so so sharp.

TLDR: plants evolved them 28 times independently, but there's one genes set used for these thorns -- genetics have identified it.

   Evolved 28 times independently and yet there's 1 set of genes that control thorns. hmmm

Spoken like someone unfamiliar with both development and evolution.

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