As Jennifer Kuzma, co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University, explained it to Gastropod, if DNA is a book, CRISPR is like a pen. "CRISPR has been put into many, many crops—nearly all the crop plants that you can transform," said Qi, whose lab has already used the technology to dramatically raise yields in rice, but also tweak the color of carrots. And Joyce Van Eck, a plant geneticist at the Boyce Thompson Institute in Ithaca, New York, tells us the story of how she is using CRISPR, combined with her understanding of tomato genetics, to fast-track the domestication of one of the Americas' most delicious orphan crops.