This article in Trends in Plant Science (which I know you’ve seen, since it flies off the news stands) argues that CRISPR should be used to create entirely new crops out of wild plants, mimicking the process that created our most common cereal crops over thousands of years.

Of the more than 300 000 plant species that exist, less than 200 are commercially important, and three species – rice, wheat, and maize – account for the major part of the plant-derived nutrients that humans consume.

Plants with desirable traits, such as perennials with extensive root systems and nitrogen-fixing plants, are currently being domesticated as new crops…

Several traits in crops that were crucial for their domestication are caused by mutations that can be reproduced by genome-editing techniques such as CRISPR/Cas9, offering the potential for accelerated domestication of new crops.