launch of all time.
The new iPhone 11
is simply amazing.
Hold on. No, not
that kind of apple.
This kind of apple.
This is a new variety of apple.
The Cosmic Crisp.
It's the largest launch of
a single variety ever.
It's the child of the blockbuster
Honeycrisp apple and the Enterprise
apple. In the U.S.,
apples are a five billion
dollar a year industry.
There are more than 7,500 varieties
of apples grown across the world
in 2,500 of those are
grown in the U.S.
like the Pink Lady, the
Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, the
Honeycrisp and America's favorite, the Gala,
which just beat out the
Red Delicious variety for
the first time ever.
Red Delicious had reigned more than
half a century before the Gala
apple dethroned it.
And yet, scientists are
still developing new varieties.
Actually, it's not just apples.
There are plant breeders, horticulturalists
and scientists around the
world working to perfect and
reinvent the food everyone knows.
Whether it be apples or berries,
mushrooms or crops like rice and
wheat. And this innovation isn't
just the controversial GMO kind.
That's short for
genetically modified organism.
In fact, crops have been cross-bred
to produce new varieties for
hundreds of years.
Plants naturally cross-pollinate, which
produces new varieties.
Here in the U.S. are breeding
programs like the one at Washington
State University that is responsible for
the more than 20 years of
work it took to create and
grow the Cosmic Crisp apple through
natural means. Here's how we invent
new foods like the Cosmic Crisp.
The first masters of biotechnology date
back to more than 12,000
years ago to the Neolithic period
of the Stone Age, where the
adoption of farming and agriculture
first began to develop.
It was then that humans isolated
elite selections of crops and mass
planted them to domesticate certain
crops, and this happened
independently in different regions all over
the world with all sorts
of plants. But the modern apple we
know today can be traced back to
Kazakhstan during the Bronze Age
and to bear droppings.
For millions of years, bears chose
to eat the larger, sweet variety
over the smaller, bitter apples.
Then through bear droppings that contain
those apple seeds, a process
called germination, more fruit trees grew
to grow that larger sweet
apple we know today.
By the first millennium BCE, apples
had become part of Western
agriculture. The ancient way of doing
it was simply planting seeds
and you'd get variation.
Fast forward a few thousand years
to colonial America in the late
1700s, nearly 100 years after the
apple was imported by immigrants,
pioneers were encouraged
to plant apples.
In 1806, Jonathon Chapman, well, you
might know him as Johnny
Appleseed, distributed apple seeds from
western Pennsylvania to West
Virginia. And this helped America's apple
crop flourish in new parts
of the country. When an apple seed
is planted, it doesn't just grow
into the same variety of apple of
the seed it was grown from.
It entirely depends on pollination.
Each plant inherits half of its DNA
from the tree the apple came from
and half from the tree
the pollen came from.
So when new apple seeds were
planted throughout the country, being
pollinated by who knows what, thousands
of new varieties hit the
market. If you planted a seed from
a Cosmic Crisp apple, you wouldn't
get a Cosmic Crisp tree.
You would get a tree that was,
had inherited 50 percent of its genes
from Cosmic Crisp, but fifty percent
from whatever pollen parent had
actually pollenize the flower that
then made that fruit.
In 1905, f ruit growers
evaluated 100,000 clones from literally
hundreds of thousands
of apple selections.
In this screening of the open
pollinated chance seedlings resulted in
varieties we still see today,
like the Red Delicious, Golden
Delicious and the McIntosh.
This starts with understanding that the tree
you see in an orchard is
a composite tree made up from two
parts, the rootstock and the scion.
That means it's made up
of two different varieties.
It has the top part
that has the fruit.
That's the scion variety.
And then the bottom
part is the rootstock.
You can have, for example, a rootstock
that makes a huge big tree and
whatever scion variety you would bud or
graft on top of that, it will
grow into a really big tree.
Grafting is a process where plant
material from one variety is fused
to another and then
together the plant grows.
And this technique dates back
thousands of years too.
It's even mentioned in the bible.
Grafting, you'll take a
bit of scion stick.
Okay, technical term, but it's
got several buds on it.
You'll cut the bottom perhaps into a
V and you'll cut a similar kind
of shape on top
of the rootstock chute.
You literally can just push the two
together, bind them, so that they
hold. And then the vascular tissues
will fuse, and that means that
you get this new tree growing
up out of the grafted wood.
This technique is also
known as clonal propagation.
That's when scientists make identical
genetic copies of a plant.
The Cosmic Crisp was made by
classical breeding, which is also known
as hybridization. Evans is part of
the breeding program at Washington
State University that developed
the Cosmic Crisp.
Fundamentally, you're taking pollen from one
of the apple trees in
our case and then using that pollen
to pollenize flowers of the other
parent. Simple process.
It's just controlled pollination, so
it's using a process that's
happening out there all the time
with bees or other visiting insects.
But the pollen that's used on
to the flowers is random.
With ours, we're using this pollen
from a specific male parent that
we've chosen to give us that
greater potential of having offspring
with the characteristics that
we're looking for.
From their plant breeders germinate
and evaluate thousands of seeds
that came out of
the hybridization process.
One of the Cosmic Crisp's
parents is the Honeycrisp apple.
Honeycrisp has got this ultra-crisp
texture that really hadn't been
seen very much until
Honeycrisp hit the market.
And for some reason, Honeycrisp caught
the fancy of America and it
changed the whole apple industry because
they found out that people
liked it so much they'd pay two
times a Honeycrisp than for regular
apples. The other parent apple is
an Enterprise, and if you haven't
heard of that one, it's because
it's mainly grown and sold in
Indiana. This is Jules Janick.
He's a horticulturalist and professor
at Purdue University in
Indiana. You can probably call him
the grandfather of the Enterprise
apple. We developed
the Enterprise apple.
Kate Evans made many crosses and one
of the crosses she made was
crossing Enterprise, which is a
big, red apple, attractive,
scab-resistant to Honeycrisp. As breeders
make crosses, each genetic
mashup between two parents generates
a unique offspring every time.
It's kind of like how siblings share
DNA from the same two parents,
but have different characteristics.
And that's because you've inherited
that maternal and paternal DNA.
But it segregates, it all mixes up.
So what we're using is breeders were
using that technique to get that
mixing up off of genes to then enable
us to be able to choose the
best individual.
The process of identifying a great
variety of apple takes years.
It takes two or three years
to really grow a tree.
So they keep replanting it and testing
it to make sure it's as good
as they think it is.
The Washington State University breeders
were looking for an apple
that would appeal to both
consumers and to growers.
So, for example, when it came
to ultimately choosing the variety that
became the Cosmic Crisp, its tastiness
and storability were at the
forefront. It's slow to brown, so you
throw your lemon trick out the
window. It's just so
natural slow to brown.
To test this, we left out two
apples overnight and here's what they
looked like after 16 hours.
A lot of people ask us all must
be a Frankenstein apple or is it GMO,
and no, it's not.
A GMO is a
genetically modified organism.
It's a plant or animal that
has been altered by genetic engineering,
which is a manipulation of an
organism's genes by either introducing,
eliminating or rearranging specific genes
using methods of modern
molecular biology, or at least that's
how it's thought of in
countries like the United States.
Technically, something that has been
genetically modified can be done
through traditional methods too,
like selective breeding.
However, the GMO technology that's
often referred to today originated
in 1973.
Scientist Herbert Boyer and Stanley
Cohen engineered the first
successful organism by cutting out a
gene from one organism and
pasting it into another.
This technique is known
as gene transfer.
However, the first food genetic modification
tests were in 1987, and
from years of testing later, Calgene's
Flavr Savr tomato hit shelves
as the first food crop to
be approved for commercial production by
the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The tomato stays riper longer
than the non-engineered variety, and
they say it's tastier.
These tomatoes were modified to be
firmer, thus extending the shelf
life. And now that the FDA
has pronounced them safe, they'll be
shipped.. But getting consumers on board
with a crop that had new
genes proved difficult.
Still, just the thought of juggling tomato
genes in a lab scares some
people. When the Flavr Savr first hit
the market in 1994, d emand was
high, but by 1998, sales sharply
dropped off as public perception
changed and the Flavr Savr tomato
was never profitable because of
high production and
distribution costs.
According to The Non-GMO Project,
there's no scientific consensus on
the safety of GMO.
Even Chipotle has indicated on their
menus that their food is
non-GMO, as part of their
"food with integrity" mission.
And they were the first restaurant
chain to do so in 2013.
But those in favor of the technology
say it allows scientists to make
food more aesthetically pleasing, easier
to cultivate, and even can
make food more nutritious.
Unfortunately, people are
afraid of GMO.
People are afraid. It's just a fear
that some crazy gene and they
don't want any in their mouth
that has been controlled by genetics.
It's an irrational fear and I might
say grafting at the same thing in
the 19th century, people were afraid
of grafting, they though it
wasn't natural. So the question
is, what's natural and what's
unnatural. New innovations now allow
scientists to edit genomes, a
living organism's entire
genetic code.
Then there's CRISPR-Cas9, which is
short for clustered regularly
interspersed short
palindromic repeats.
The way it works is kind of like
having a document on a computer and
using the find tool to locate a
specific word and then adjust that
word. CRISPR enables you to change
some of those sequences to mimic
many other natural variations.
So in a fruit or vegetable
with conventional breeding, you know, you
have a mother and a father and
the children are always a combination,
but what happens if you could actually
just change one of the traits
and not have to go through
all the changing of everything?
CRISPR has seen its ethical
challenges, particularly when it's used
in human science.
In November 2018, a Chinese scientist
said that he used the gene
editing technology on twin girls
to protect them from getting
infected with the AIDS virus.
CRISPR was used on embryos, disabling
a particular gene that allows
HIV to enter a cell.
But the approach restricted
in the U.S.
and much of Europe
drew an international outcry.
China sentenced him to
three years in prison.
Scientists are using CRISPR on the
food we eat, like to keep
mushrooms from browning or to make
oranges resistant to the greening
disease that is killing citrus
plants around the world.
One startup, Pairwise, is currently
using CRISPR to grow cherries
without a pit and to
extend their growing season.
These natural breeding process take
a long, long time.
The one example I can give
is think about seedless grapes.
That's a natural genetic variation.
Well, we're working on using that
same information to derived from
those grapes and create a
cherry without a pit.
What pairwise is doing is essentially
speeding up what they say would
happen naturally anyway.
It would just take years
to happen in the wild.
And it's generally mimicking something
that's already been naturally
done. We're only working on things
that could be done through
breeding, but could be much faster.
Apples are 2.5
billion dollar a year business in
Washington, which grows about 60
percent of the nation's supply
or nearly 140 million boxes.
But these growers can't just
grow any ol' apple.
Turns out, many
apples have patents.
New varieties are trademarked, patented
and marketed like any other
brand. Some of these
apples are club apples.
Growers are paying somewhere around
sixty three thousand dollars an
acre to plant a branded variety.
Any branded of variety, any apple.
Owning the intellectual property rights to
a certain kind of apple
started in the mid 20th century
when the first varieties were
patented as a way to compensate growers
who spent time and money to
develop them. Most breeders would patent
their apple varieties in the
U.S. The Cosmic Crisp is a new
club apple, and it's managed by
Proprietary Variety Management, where Grandy
is the director of
marketing. We are trademarked in
probably over a hundred countries
and we have a few partners
internationally so that they can protect
the trademarks. And so the patent
for this particular apple is under
its name, W-A 38.
Washington State University
owns that patent.
Washington State has a 10-year exclusive
deal to grow the Cosmic
Crisp, and that's because the
University of Washington collaborated
with growers in the state.
Growers then have a license to produce
the WA-38 trees, and then that
license enables them to sell their
fruit under the Cosmic Crisp
brand. The license actually comes
through when they purchase the
trees through the nursery.
Most growers will still purchase trees,
so the nursery will produce
finished trees. For growers, it can be
a huge investment to take on
growing a new variety.
For a grower to make that investment,
t hey've got to be fairly
confident that it's the direction
they want to go in.
Why the growers do it?
Growers do it because
fundamentally they're in business.
Some argue that the future of
plant breeding lies in CRISPR
technology.
CRISPR technology, gene-editing, is something
that we use to change
an individual gene and that is
the plant breeding of the future.
Baker says growers have a
reason to stay excited.
Growers are generally excited about
any technology that helps make
farming easier. Just like consumers
are generally excited about
anything that makes
healthy food easier.
We're working on making fruits
and vegetables more convenient, more
available and more affordable.
Regardless of whether the fruit was
modified in a lab or hybridized
in a breeding program, many say there
is space in the produce section
for new products.
And new produce means higher price
tags and higher price tags can
mean a better profit for growers.
Growers obviously are interested in growing
a new product where they
hope to be able to get
a better return on their investment.
No comments:
Post a Comment