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Apple Gene for Red Color Found
FiReaNGeL writes "Researchers have located the gene that controls the red color of apples — a discovery that may lead to bright new apple varieties. 'The red color in apple skin is the result of anthocyanins, the natural plant compounds responsible for blue and red colours in many flowers and fruits,' says the leader of the CSIRO. By identifying master genes that were activated by light, they were able to pinpoint the gene that controls the formation of anthocyanins in apples. 'As well as giving apples their rosy red hue, anthocyanins are also antioxidants with healthy attributes, giving us plenty of reasons to study how the biochemical pathway leading to apple color is regulated,' researchers said."
Were going to be seeing Red iPods soon
orange apples incoming
now apples and oranges shall be COMPARABLE!!!
Now in stores, they'll be able to have Apples in Blueberry, Grape, Lime, Strawberry and Tangerine colours. Oh wait...
Already are my friend. Already are.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
""Researchers have located the gene that controls the red color of apples -- a discovery that may lead to bright new apple varieties. "
How about we answer, "why?" before messing around with things.
"...the red color of apples -- a discovery that may lead to bright new apple varieties" Yup...looks that way.
"Colour is a very important part of fruit marketing," she says. "If fruit doesn't look good, consumers are far less likely to buy it, no matter how good it might taste.
Dear marketing department : Shove it!
If people won't buy things that arn't perfect they don't deserve to enjoy the taste of it. Apples are the way they are because that's how they are best within our system. If you start messing with the genes who knows what side effects will happen? Just leave the damn things alone and go leech money off something else. Plant life is quite happy not being pretty to consumers.
I guess next they'll be making coconuts with soft shells because "It's so difficult to open one"
I like muppets.
Next poll:
What would you like your apple to look like?
- Green and red stripes
- Green and red checkers
- Black
-Cowboyneil's ass
errrr...
Yeah, next thing you know they'll be making grasses with grains so heavy, they won't blow around in the wind anymore and people will need to manually harvest and re-seed the fields every year. Lazy meddling Mesopotamians.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Now we're going to see blue apples... and I thought green ketchup was bad...
Can they figure out a way of manufacturing food in mass quantities with minimal raw materials. That is, you have a factory to which u supply water, esentail minerals (mined ore?) that contain iron etc, and electricty and out the other end comes out a starch like carbohydrate and nutrients.
Now you may think this is useless nobody will want to eat it even with flavoring. But it can be used to manufacture cheap food for third world countries so their people can do things other than farming and fighting over arable land (like get an education, build roads, industries, work on cures for diseases, go on vacations). Only problem is we may ultimately see a major decline in global population because people who aren't poor tend to opt not to have enough kids to cause population growth.
I think food produced this way will cost dramatically less than farms food (think 10 cents for a full day's 2000 calorie meal).
OK fuckers, I'm prepared to pay extra cash for a Black Apple.
CSIRO - do you ugliest.
Does that mean my macbook will not become red hot any more?
Granny Smith apples in this study?
But seriously, does this mean that we'll soon see makeup products that will make women's lips permanently red? Or perhaps some other useful product that all of North America is just dying to have?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
My family is heavily into organic food, and now that I am out of the house, I still try to eat stuff grown reasonably well, for taste and health reasons. But anyway, back at my old house, there were a number of apple trees in the yard when we moved in. One tree always has apples that look like they are covered in dust. The other trees don't. Blemishes and bumps are common, along with the occasional worm. Nothing in the supermarket, "organic" or otherwise, compares. Firm, not full of water, not ridiculously crispy, and have more of the taste of an apple than any other apple I have tried.
The way an apple looks matters little to me. Sure, the inability to wipe the dirty appearance off the apples put me off at first, but I now know that a bright red apple will taste more like water than anything else. And now thanks to the discovery of this gene, mega-orchards can grow good looking crops with far less effort, fertilizer, or taste, I would expect.
Things like this make me consider dropping out of the sciences. Every advancement seems to merely be another opportunity to cut back something else, and get away with less bottom-line. Still, maybe with the extra anti-oxidant thing, it could be worth it.
I have freaks! I did something right...
bright new apple varieties.
:)
Maybe not. There was just a nobel prize awarded in this area of research. IIRC, the gene expression is regulated by a twisted helix RNA type which prevents overexpression of given genes, and there's some feedback mechanism which causes the chromosomal DNA to stop expressing the mRNA after a while.
The original studies which started this were botanists trying to make more pink petunias - when they inserted more "pink" genes, the petunias came out white. The prize research was about regulation in c.elegans.
Botanists and molecular biologists will now shred my analysis.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"If we asked why for everything that has happened in the past several thousand years, we'd not be where we are today."
Yay to global warming, ice cap melting, deforestation, and enviromental pollution. Love that headlong rush.
5...
4...
3...
2...
1...
Apples that are UV reactive would be awesome for my next case mod!
"Bono".
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Roses are red, Apples are too, I know you colour gene, Now you are blue!
Well, I guess that explains this.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
I wish I had mod points for you.
Changing the nature of our environment to suit our needs has been something humans have been doing almost since we have been recognizable as humans (or perhaps this effect on nature is what makes humans identifiable as humans). Agriculture was one of the first of these changes - it allowed us to develop new ways of living that would have been impossible without it.
But it's funny to think about how counter-intuitive these changes are to the good of the plants/animals/beings that we're changing. While changing the color of an apple is trivial, the apple's red color is something that came about because it best fit the purpose and function of the apple to be red. If we turned apples blue, this could adversely affect tree reproduction - or it might lead to the starvation of certain animals that use apples as a primary food source. We have done a number on grain. Hard-coded dependencies in nature would likely crumble. Pigs, which never would have existed, at least not in their domestic forms, would certainly be an early casualty.
Survival of the fittest has turned into survival of whatever humans like. It's certainly the current paradigm of generational mutation. And it's interesting to think about how scientists of a future species would try to explain the strange characteristics of the various lifeforms on Earth if humans were wiped off the planet without a trace except the changes in the planet's biology we've effected...
How many of our adaptations would survive without our care?
Will the new colorful apples be just as tasteless? I would be nice if they focused on growing apples that actually tasted of something other than wet and crunchy cardboard.
Me, I'm just glad I don't pay for this bloody nonsense...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
I participated in an apple tasting festival a year or so ago, and I only really learned one thing. The uglier the variety of apple, the better it tastes. A perfectly-colored, gargantuan Red Delicious from the store has nearly no flavor whatsoever. By contrast, if you find one that looks like a potato, you are in for a treat.
I'm going to rain on their parade. I don't care what the apple looks like. I'd just like to be able to go into the supermarket and buy an apple that's crispy and doesn't present me with a mouth full of watery mush when I bite into it. All their engineering efforts at getting "perfect" apples to market have done is to take away the essential crispness of the fruit. I don't even want to think about what they do to preserve the average grocery-store apple.
Thankfully we still have farmer's markets and local pick-your-own orchards. A blemish or two doesn't count for anything against the crisp, sweet taste of a real, unpreserved apple. Too bad we may have a generation that thinks an "apple" is an improbably red, waxed object with the taste and texture of oversweetened oatmeal.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
You know, Apple? It's not good enough to be bondi blue -- we want dalmation!
The weather that year also plays an important role, mainly rainfall and the amount of sun and heat. That's easily demonstrated as the main factor by the simple fact that all the farmers in a region get the same kind of results for a given year (small red apples, big lightly colored ones, fragile things that fall on the ground).
In fact chemicals are very expensive to an apple grower so you can bet that they try to use them as little as they can.
That's not to say that they don't spray, they do spray a lot but it's in their best interest to spray as little as possible and many are trying to limit their use of chemicals.
If there is anything wrong, it's the association in consumer's mind of the red color and ripeness. You can have perfectly sweet and ripe fruits but that aren't all that red. This has lead to variety (like the delicious) that is very red but has no taste. To each his own.
Chemicals may be expensive in some cases, but I believe in general chemical fertilizer is cheaper than transporting compost, when crops are grown in large batches. I think "you are what you eat" applies to apples as well as anything, and a bag of chemicals... is not going to taste as good as a bag of composted leaves, windfall, and faecal matter. OK, never mind that analogy.
I have freaks! I did something right...
Well, indirectly, they already are manufacturing food. More than half of the world's fixed nitrogen is produced (converted from N2 to a biologically available form, like ammonia or nitrate) in a factory as part of fertilizer production, replacing what used to be done by microbes in the soil. Plants use this nitrogen to grow, and we eat them to grow, and thus a large fraction of the nitrogen in the protein in your body has passed through a factory.
(Exception granted if you are Amish, and still farming the old way. If you are Amish, should you really be reading slashdot?)
The Grapple Fruits company has something to cheer about when they get purple apples. Now if only they could genetically engineer their flavor instead of just ingeniously soaking their apples in artificial grape flavoring.
http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/red/
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
I can't wait to have a red granny smith apple.
Slashdot has a definate pro-apple bias!
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Now I can finally get a Ferrari in true "candy apple red".
--
make install -not war
I remember when the best-tasting apple you could get was a Delicious from Yakima, Washington. Precisely the right balance of sweet, tart, firmness, juice, etc. The best ones were a very dark red, almost a purplish-black shade, rather than bright red, and they tended to be irregularly shaped.
I read an article a while back, about how breeding for marketable appearance and storage tolerance has, by ill chance, bred out the true apple taste and texture, and that the genes for the tasty old-style apple have been lost in the main commercial gene pool.
That's a sad loss. I'd rather have an ugly apple that tastes wonderful, than a pretty apple that's dull eating.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"Botanists and molecular biologists will now shred my analysis. :)"
Why? Do you think it will fall into enemy hands?
Ah, I seriously doubt that it was the leader of the CSIRO who announced this - if he announced every discovery he wouldn't have any time to do anything else, given that the CSIRO is a massive government-funded dedicated research agency with over 6500 staff. In fact, from the article:
"The red colour in apple skin is the result of anthocyanins, the natural plant compounds responsible for blue and red colours in many flowers and fruits," says the leader of the CSIRO Plant Industry research team, Dr Mandy Walker.
Not a big issue, just a little clarification (it just struck me as odd in the summary).
Might be worth requiring by law that all genetically altered food is of a obviously diffrent colour as a kind of warning, I would love blue apples, then again I had that green tomato sauce, that made me feel sick. Maybe the next Firefox crop circle could be in colour.
cat
tried to claim IP on it.
http://www.patentgenius.com/patent/PP14757.html
(is this the first m$ bash on the page?)
I'm a big fan of smaller, green apples. They're not near as bland as the red ones -- both being commercial varieties -- but I still say the best ones I've ever had came from an old farmer my great aunt lived near.
He made cider, too.
Real cider. Not pasteurized. If you've never had unpasteurized cider, you're missing out -- the cooking changes the flavor, and it's not for the better. The things we do to avoid bacteria!
So while the tasty genes may not exist in the commercial gene pool, they're still out there. Heck, all sorts of old genes are laying around -- there's a whole field of traditional varieties of fruits and vegetables and flowers. People collect 'em. Out back I've got a rose bush that's well over 100 years old -- you'll not find anything in the store like it, but it's the HARDIEST rose bush I've ever seen. Survived several replantings, a chewing-to-the-ground by a dog who thought it was yummy.. insane.
But it does like blood. Very thorny, and I swear it throws itself out towards flesh...
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
... and it would make third world farmers even more dependent on major western food corporations or their patents. The next Monsanto is due! This move would allow western corporations to keep a foothold in the third world food production by patents, instead of allowing these countries to produce their own food in peace. It would effectively kill local farming. Stopping all these proxy wars is part of the solution, in order to stop colonialism, not creating more dependecies.
Hey man that sounds like soylent green for the poor. Millions of poor people standing in a queue for free artificial food. What should they pay the artificial food from when they're unemployed? These countries have little industry. Farming is the one major employment chance there.
How hypocritical can one be?
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
I eat an apple every workday, as part of my lunch. Two varieties that are really delicious, crispy and juicy: Fuji and Braeburn. They really have a nice bite to 'em.
By performing a taste test!
Now in the news: Apple sues apples for copyright infringement, claims that iApple - a project to make customized colored apples for all trendy fruit-lovers, has been hijacked!
Shoudln't that read Apple iGene?
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
The colour of Apple is white, usually with glossy and shiny finish. So have some common sense, people.
Uh but isn't cider alcoholic? So why bother pasteurizing? If you do things right you shouldn't have dangerous bacteria left, correct?
This actually would eliminate the dependency.
.. well then they will be stuck with having only that type of food and crappy living conditions.
... build power plants .. build hospitals ..build housing .. sanitation networks .. water canals .. roads .. i dunno .. industrialize their countries!
.. I dare say a Monsanto won't be the one to come up with this, and that you lobby that patents on this crap be eliminated. Besides there is more money to be made by investing in companies building the local infrastructures so they can provide goods that improve the world's quality of life than having people starve to death. Once people aren't in a position of being forced to take horrible working conditions versus starving to death .. worker conditions will improve.
Also, what would the people do if they are given cheaper/free food? Let me ask you, are you a farmer? Do you think farming is the only thing they can do?
Why do you want to force them to be dependent on farming, which is labor intensive and susceptible to drought?
Maybe some will see it as welfare and not do ANY work
Well fed people can do OTHER (easier) jobs. Build cars, read books
As for the patent issue. Well patents expire, and plus
Now we just need to find the color gene in Apple Computers to make them less... white.
Great Intellect...
NFTA(*):
Years ago, researchers performed some experiments where this gene was deactivated with the help of a targeted gene-suppressing retrovirus. The resulting fruits were so ugly colored they had to rebrand them as "iMac" and sell them to computer fashion victims.
(*): Not From The Article
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
Good to see we have our priorities right. I mean, f\/ck the poor and starving, as long as our apples match our interiors we can sleep easy at night. Is this all they could come up with after years of education, did it not cross their minds that they could be doing something worthwhile - sheesh, enough already.
It's all very well fiddling around with those things, but when they talk about 'better apples' they simply mean apples that will sell better, keep better during transport, require less to grow etc. This is why you can hardly find a good apple in a supermarket - they tend to be hard (so they don't bruise too easily), not too aromatic (since that attracts insects) and shiny so people notice them. Unfortunately they are not very good to eat - leathery flesh and little taste is what you mostly get. All the good, old-fashioned varieties tend to be comparatively floury, aromatic and not incredibly shiny.
Is she a Golgafrincham? Has she researched into what people want from fruit, you know, how they relate to it, the image; do they want fruit that can be fitted nasally?
Seriously, they do. Half of the time I think I have a good one, it turns out to be a squishy pile of wet sand in my mouth.
It's all about the Fugi Apple. Ya, they're kind of red... but not red red. Red Delicious is teh suck. Worst Apple Ever.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Thats a result of differing UK/US terminoligy. In the UK we refer to the alcoholic drink made from apples as "cider" but in the US "cider" referes to cloudy pressed apple juice and the alcoholic drink is called "hard cider"
What human gene is responsible for making soylent green?
Labradoodle
Set your phasers on "funky"!
What happened? It's a story with 'Apple' in the title and there is no FUD tag?
The zealots must be slipping.
Anyone else read the headline and think they'd found a cure for ginger hair?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
How long before we see blue apples?
How can you then promote a story which claims that scientists are able to remove the red color from apples? :)
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
Was prepared to see a story about Macintosh.
[ducks flying shoe]
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
. . . Reality Distortion Fields?
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
How do you like them apples? sorry...
I'm not a brewer, but this is my understanding from those who are:
Bacteria are the enemies of brewing. Bacterial contamination can ruin beer, cider, or wine (not sure what they do to hard liquor), and if you get a clostridium or other nasty anaerobe in your equipment, the results can be toxic. Remember, the ingredients don't *start off* alcoholic, so nasties DO have a chance to grow during the early stages, before the yeast get their act in gear.
So if you're a brewer (home or commercial), it behooves you to keep your equipment scrupulously clean, and invite no more bacteria than those found naturally in food. (Inside, not surface bacteria. And very little lives *inside* solid tissue, like an apple's flesh.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
No, the analogy is still a good one. Apples covered in chemical pesticides _do_ taste worse than shit.
Now I'm really looking forward for the apples I eat to look like this. :-(
Oh wait, that sounds just like I'm Microsoft...
If they only moved the "pink gene" than it's no surprise it didn't work. It's oft quoted how similar our DNA is to that of chimps, but quite clearly we're not chimps - it's not the code per se that determines what you are, it how and when you read it.
# ok, I know it's not the cleanest bit of code, it's not OO, it's poorly documented and it mixes in functions into a what looks like a procedural language, but it's the best analogy I could figure out. DNA is a random access data store, but the transcription system is fairly linear. In a cell - the functions would be inputs from other organelles, and the constants wouldn't be hardcoded. But it'll do.
Perhaps they could use this new knowledge, somehow, to develop an apple without a protein that causes people to have allergic reactions. I have anaphalactic reactions from just apple juice, never mind eating an apple. From the small amounts of research that I have done, there are people who are allergic to apples as well. Perhaps they could GE a variety of apples that would be safe for us?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heirloom_plant
Modern day fruit/vegetable shoppers are spoiled by supermarkets that only sell perfect looking produce & the result is a lot of waste, as perfectly edible, but trivially blemished food gets thrown away b/c no one will buy it.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
doh! didn't encode a chevron :( - see, now that's an example as to how the misencoding of a single character can destroy the sense of a message ;)
...
1000-1270 should read :
1000 GOTO 1
1250 PRODUCTS=MEASURE("FRUCTOSE")
1251 WHILE (PRODUCTS < ENOUGHFORFRUCTOSE )
1260 IF GENETOEXPRESS = 10 AND THEN GOSUB 2000
sorry 'bout that !
I've had some pretty good green apples too, of unknown variety and provenance.
:) Have you tried growing offspring from cuttings?
Funny thing, the best apples also kept better in the short term, whereas the newer commercial types get mealy [ick!] real fast. But they're largely selected for how well they hold up in long-term storage. I have a few in my fridge that have been there for over a year and a half, and they still look like fresh apples.
My fave non-sweet apple is the "beer apple" (it's not exactly sour, but it's not the same tartness as an eating apple either). I *think* it's actually one of the common rootstocks, not a cultivated variety. Very rarely seen as a mature tree, presumably because it's only seen when the graft dies off and the rootstock takes over. The apples are barrel-shaped, about 1.3" long, and a distinctive dark blood red. You can't eat very many at a time (they'll make you sick) but they make the BEST pink jelly ever.
I'll bet your old rose has a SMELL, too. It's not a proper rose if it doesn't have a smell!!
BTW one of the prominent rose researchers says DON'T prune any more than you absolutely have to (only to remove dead and overly-straggly or crowded limbs), because pruning actually destroys the rose over time. I can certainly attest that mine bloom best when left to their own devices, and certainly exhibit less heat stress.
I haven't had much luck growing roses from cuttings (probably cuz it gets too hot here during the growing season -- we peak at 118F) but have been collecting hips from likely specimens. I know that's a crapshoot, but better than not saving those old genes at all.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Patent Pending # 154332354
load "$",8,1
They should really name this newly discovered sequence "Bono" — being responsible, as he is, for making Apple's red.
--
>> -- a discovery that may lead to bright new apple varieties
God I hope not. I'd much rather eat food that hasn't had its genes constructed in a lab.
Bad eating fruit makes for great jelly fruit ;) Up until about 7 years ago, we had an age-old cherry tree in our back yard -- with huge, dark, seeded, SOUR cherries. Couldn't eat them, but the birds loved it.. and made for some pretty good pie. Unfortunately before I could get a new one growing, it got diseased and died.. I realized it was probably pretty uncommon too late.
:D
The rose bush.. well. I accidentally replanted it along the alleyway this year. It found a crack in the side of the shed and sent a branch inside, which quickly grew to about 7' long -- and was stark white from the total lack of sunlight. Had to cut it off, threw it out back, and it landed with the cut end in some loose dirt we bought to fill in some holes.
And started growing. O_o
I'm honestly scared of this thing. I think one day I'm going to wake up and it'll have grown into the house and be laying in bed next to me.. jaws open..
It does smell wonderful though, when the wind's right it'll fill up my bedroom. On the second story, about 40 feet away.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Sour cherries still exist aplenty, because most varieties of sweet cherry require a sour cherry as a pollinator, why I don't know.
:)
Attack of the killer rosebush!! next time you trim it, maybe you could send me a few chunks? it sounds like just what we need here in the desert. Maybe it'll eat a few of the Starving Attack Rabbits.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?