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."

Comments

Does that mean

[Anonymous Coward]

Were going to be seeing Red iPods soon

Re:Does that mean

[alamandrax]

finally, they can make those red nosed reindeer we keep hearing about. i'll bet it'll look great in front of a K-mart. let's get martha to pitch in.

Re:Does that mean

[__aaclcg7560]

You mean these? I think your gene pool may have an active "slow on the uptake" gene. :P

Re:Does that mean

[spacedsteve]

check out these RED iPods for World AID day today http://www.joinred.com/products.asp?p=5

colors

[Anonymous Coward]

orange apples incoming

now apples and oranges shall be COMPARABLE!!!

Re:colors

[Salvance]

Now all they need to do is make all fruits LOOK the same, but taste different. That would be fun, although a bit of a pain in the grocery store I suspect. You'd have all those prankster kids grabbing the kumquat flavored generifruit and putting them in the banana flavored generifruit bins.

Re:colors

[polar red]

I want a black apple, that's WAAY cooler.

Re:colors

[James McGuigan]

I want the classic snow white apple.

Re:colors

[jrockway]

> So what are you, some kind of racist?

Apples have race?

Think of the marketing potential

[Anonymous Coward]

Now in stores, they'll be able to have Apples in Blueberry, Grape, Lime, Strawberry and Tangerine colours. Oh wait...

Re:Apples & Oranges

[zippthorne]

Already are my friend. Already are.

...Just in Time for Xmas

[mwnyc]

"...the red color of apples -- a discovery that may lead to bright new apple varieties" Yup...looks that way.

Re:...Just in Time for Xmas

[jpardey]

So your parents read slashdot too?

Re:The Terrible Tinkerer.

[metlin]

Why not?

It is the inherent human curiosity to do something just because.

The insatiable curiosity, the urge to do something, to tamper, to tinker for no reason except that we can.

If we asked why for everything that has happened in the past several thousand years, we'd not be where we are today.

awesome varieties

[blueadept1]

Next poll:

What would you like your apple to look like?
- Green and red stripes
- Green and red checkers
- Black
-Cowboyneil's ass

errrr...

Re:awesome varieties

[ZachPruckowski]

Missing Option: Rainbow Colored

Yeah!

[Kadin2048]

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.

Oh Crap...

[ewl1217]

Now we're going to see blue apples... and I thought green ketchup was bad...

Black Apple!

[nighty5]

OK fuckers, I'm prepared to pay extra cash for a Black Apple.

CSIRO - do you ugliest.

The best apples I have ever tasted

[jpardey]

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.

Re:The best apples I have ever tasted

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to live in Brazil and apples there (and other fruits in general) do not look as nearly as good as US ones. Fruits have blemishes, irregular format and shape, etc.

Then I went to the US and bought some of those impossibly red, glossy and simetrically-shaped apples.

They tasted like biting on a piece of styrofoam.

And this goes with most of other produce in US supermarkets.

Is the average US consumer so shallow that his behaviour actually prevents the one economical superpower of the world from getting actually tasty stuff?

Re:The best apples I have ever tasted

[jpardey]

I went to Mexico, and had a similar experience with bananas. The contrast is pretty incredible to the stringy, styrofoamy things we have here. I have a feeling that only greater profit margins will come of it, and perhaps more kids who hate fruits and vegetables. With any luck, America will collapse under the weight of its own fat, and leave the rest of the world alone in a few years.

Let he who has had his/her daily share of fruits and vegetables cast the first -1 troll.

Re:The best apples I have ever tasted

[Rick17JJ]

Manipulating the genetics to get redder apples means that color will be even less of an indication of ripeness than it is now. The Delicious variety of apples in the grocery store are always bright red but usually not very good tasting. I once heard that the Delicious apples were bred more for color than taste. If I remember correctly, I also also once read about apples and possibly even salmon being gassed to alter color. Is that correct? I don't know if that is commonly done or not.

At least here in Arizona, I have noticed that the organic apples at a local health food store typically seem to taste slightly better than the ones at the grocery stores. Some (but not all) of those apples also say that they are locally grown. Some of the apples at the health food store seem to have more nicks and scars and less uniform coloring. Because of that I have been relying less on color or freedom from nicks and scars as any kind of indication of quality. I have been eating apples for about 50 years now and if I remember correctly, 30 years ago color was once a good indication of ripeness and quality.

At the health food store, they were recently also selling a very old variety of tomatoes from a long time ago that is rarely grown any more. That variety of tomatoes came in various shades of red, dull red, orange and yellow. Some even had slight greenish tinges, but they were good tasting for store bought tomatoes.

By the way, a local farm here, has been selling chickens and turkeys that were raised without hormones and given more room to wander around. They were also fresher because they were locally grown here in Arizona. They always tasted much better than the ones from the grocery stores. Unfortunately, in recent years, the government has reduced the water rights to the point that Young's Farm is going out of business. They took away more of their water rights, each year, even though they were a popular local attraction and had been farming there since 1947. Developers who purchased the land are planning to put a housing development on the land instead. They were the only ones that raised turkeys in Arizona.

Re:The best apples I have ever tasted

[d3ac0n]

How retarded is that ?

Not at all really.

You have to consider that there are very good reasons why food (or anything else, for that matter) is shipped internationally. Cost. It's simply cheaper to expend the time and energy going halfway around the world to get your produce than it is to get it locally. Likely it has alot to do with the fact that the cost of producing the same food in a nearly 3rd world country is significantly less than it is to produce it locally. Also, as many of these countries are not heavily developed (as in land development) there is plenty of low-cost land available to farm on. In Europe, where there has been heavy development for literally hundreds if not thousands of years, the arable land available is very small and very very expensive to produce on. (It's less of an issue in America, as it has large tracts of arable flat land in the midwest.) So this makes farming in Europe very expensive. So expensive that it's actually cheaper to sail around the world and bring food back from far off countries.

Of course, as many of the 3rd world nations begin to throw off the shackles of dictatorships and communism and develop viable capitalist economies they will begin to enter the 2nd and 1st worlds, which steadily makes it less and less profitable to purchase food from them. Some areas will retain thier agricultural base, but many will likely switch to industrial or high-tech as time goes on. This a natural and inevitable process, which will eventually lead us back to producing more food locally as the costs equalize. Of course, this process will take decades if not hundreds of years to happen, so there shouldn't be any serious economic upheaval because of it.

The only current threat to this process is the spread of radical Islam, and the 7th century ideologies it espouses. While Islamofascists seem to be adept at adopting new technologies to their own ends, their violent and oppressive ideology prevents them from truly capitalizing on progressive and democratic concepts and leaves them in an economic straightjacket. If this Ideology takes hold in too many 3rd world countries we could see a permanent 3rd world develop. Let us all hope that does not happen.

Re:The best apples I have ever tasted

[pafrusurewa]

You do realize that Europe produces way too much food and spends money destroying said food surplus? And that in the EU (and the US for that matter) there are huge subsidies? And that farmers are paid for _not_ producing food?

I recently read a report in which a farmer in Ghana complained that he can't compete with cheap and imported Dutch onions because of EU subsidies.

Bright new apple varieties?

[bill_mcgonigle]

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. :)

Re:Bright new apple varieties?

[Reziac]

I read somewhere that the wide array of new colours in petunias (which when I was a kid, only came in white, red, pink, and red/white striped) derive from the addition of genes from corn.

A few years ago I planted a couple random flats of these new-colour'd petunias, and let them crossbreed and reseed however they pleased. The next generation's blooms were strange, to say the least. Some had irregular white blotches; others were delicately shaded, like watercolours that had gotten wet. Many had a crepe or wrinkled texture. Some displayed unlikely shades of blue and purple that I'd never seen before. A few had a "beard" (extra petals, but not a double flower). And most were moderately hardy perennials, surviving winter temps down to the mid teens. (Tho a perennial in the tropics, petunias normally die off at the first frost.) And they all bloomed like there was no tomorrow, and the 3rd generation came up like weeds.

I had the weirdest looking flower garden you ever saw. :)

Re:Bright new apple varieties?

[jcmurray]

I'm not an "ordained" molecular biologist, but I'll add to your comments. Bright new apple varieties can be introduced into apples via genetic manipulation at the chromosomal (genomic) DNA level. In organisms, from plants to animals, you can inject (or "transfect") a specific gene into a cell relatively easily. This type of injection can be permanent or temporary. A permanent injection could yield a new apple variety. This is direct genetic manipulation.

There is another way. The tried-and-true method for introducing new apple varieties would involve mating (or "crossing") current apple varieties which represent traits of interest. For example, find the two shinest, reddiest apples and cross them to see if you can generate an even shiner, redder apple. This is indirect genetic manipulation, which relies upon specific selection.

Finally, yes, there was a Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery of a mechanism for gene silencing called RNA interference, or RNAi. Scientists tried injecting double stranded RNA (dsRNA) encoding "pink" genes into petunias. This RNA interfered with the normal expression of the pink genes, which yielded white plants. This mechanism, RNAi, is now used to limit (or "knockdown") the expression of specific genes in labs around the world. It is a powerful and useful technique. To clarify, the chromosomal DNA doesn't actually stop expressing the gene--it still makes messanger RNA ("mRNA") for the gene, but does not translate the mRNA into protein. These mRNAs are effectively blocked or degraded before translation via RNAi, as long as the RNAi components are present in the cell. To permanently block the expression of a gene via RNAi, one must use the method of transfection (described above) to insert the RNAi "gene" into chromosomal DNA.

Hope this helps. (I tend to be a bit long-winded.)

Countdown Until Somebody Patents This:

[ewl1217]

5...

4...

3...

2...

1...

Re:The Terrible Tinkerer.

[__aaclcg7560]

That's a simple one. New patents on new varities means money for the patent holder(s). Karen Travis wrote a series of novels where all the plant and animal life on Earth was patented by corporations that planting unaltered seeds was illegal, and they wanted the unaltered plant and animal stock sent out to a colony 75 light years away that's being fought over by bunch of aliens who just don't give a damn about patents. I don't think that future is too far off.

And I believe it's called...

[Anonymous Freak]

"Bono".

Roses are red...

[hall_simon]

Roses are red, Apples are too, I know you colour gene, Now you are blue!

Re:The Terrible Tinkerer Trippin over his feet.

[metlin]

How about -- not at the mercy of nature as we once were, comfortable living, increased life expectancy, understanding our universe and our world better than we ever did and so on?

I think Slashdotters are becoming a whiny bunch.

Sure, there are problems in this world. Nobody is denying that.

But guess what? Civilization would not have happened if someone hadn't been curious in the first place -- to see what that piece of meat tasted like. To use that stone as a tool and to build and create.

Instead, you'd be running on a very green, pristine Earth for your life from a predator.

I think I'd rather have this, thank you very much.

The age and ways of the human

[traindirector]

Lazy meddling Mesopotamians.

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?

Re:The Terrible Tinkerer Trippin over his feet.

[metlin]

Technology brings rapid change to society and system, there is no shying away from that.

Let's see, all that burning coal has brought humans to regions in this world that could not sustain human civlization.

If all that burning coal is harmful, use nuclear fuel. If nuclear waste disposal becomes a problem, find a better source. The idea is to keep at it and not stop something because it also has potential for misuse.

Today, you may wipe out the dodos, but tomorrow you may have advanced enough technology to recreate dodos from their remains.

Also, I don't think humans were as weak in nature as you portray them.

You probably do not spend enough time outdoors else you'd not be making that statement.

Apple Knowledge

[ari_j]

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.

Re:Apple Knowledge

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

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.

In fact, studies have shown that the redder the apple, the worse it tastes. This along with a decision by growers to select cultivars for appearance and not taste is why Red Delicious is certainly not delicious but more often than not mush when you taste it. I'm a little skeptical that increasing the amount of anthocyanins in apples is a good idea because I think those tend to be bitter in taste and bitterness is not a desirable characteristic of apples.

It's the genetics not the color or the chemicals

[scattol]

Apples taste is chiefly controled by their genetics. Essentially, watery and tart apples tend to be early summer apples and crips and sweet ones are late fall varieties. There is, essentially an direct correlation/tradeoff with maturing time and taste. Everything else that the farmer does only affect this a tiny bit. Otherwise they could turn their Melbas into Cortland just by spraying them which simply doesn't happen.

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.

Re:It's the genetics not the color or the chemical

[jpardey]

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.

Re:The Terrible Tinkerer Trippin over his feet.

[metlin]

Haven't you looked at mammoths? Even our cave-men ancestors looked puny in comparison.

The point I was trying to make is that science and technology are not some kind of evil that are screwing things over. They are keeping us away from the ruthless side of nature that we'd otherwise be exposed to. Goodluck trying to find a cave in the middle of a winter in the midwest with just a sheepskin. Let's see how long you last (and how comfortable you are). And goodluck finding one in the jungles of India or the grasslands of Africa, before you ruthlessly get torn apart or stomped upon.

The very coal that causes pollution is what keeps you warm, comfortable and safe.

And Dodos? Bah, so humans wiped them out. As if nature hasn't selected other species for extinction before. There is a reason evolution happened and we came out on top of the foodchain. I am not advocating the extinction of species, merely that if it has already happened because of our ignorance, then the solution is not to stop science (or our curiosity) but rather to channel it in a way that this does not happen again.

Are there social and ecological side effects to using technology? Yes. Most certainly. Nobody is denying that.

But sometimes, it takes risks for science and society to take that leap forward. Someone wanted to make sure that there were no dragons out there. Someone took a ship and explored. Sure, there was spread of disease but there was also progress.

I think that is what counts. In the long run, it is how much better we've made the life of humanity's lot.

Re:Can they figure out a way of manufacturing food

[kfg]

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.

It's called a potato field.

KFG

This proves it!

[soft_guy]

Slashdot has a definate pro-apple bias!

Re:The Terrible Tinkerer Trippin over his feet.

[Shihar]

Good for you. No one is saying that there should be no technology, just that there should be some thought. What is burning all this coal doing? What is going to happen if we keep hunting Dodos? Should I drive to work, or walk to the bus and lose some weight? Also, I don't think humans were as weak in nature as you portray them.

It is easy to smugly say that we shouldn't ever burn coal... all the while you burn your merry amount of coal in electrical costs and enjoy the fruits of an industrial revolution that was powered by coal. If we had never used coal we sure as shit would have never developed any 'green' technologies to begin with. I am not saying we need to go out and burn down the rain forest to make a parking lot, but that we should realize that the path towards technological progress is messy. There was never a "clean" solution around the industrial revolution other then not having it. I don't know about you, but I am damn glad that my ancestors toiled through the industrial revolution when they did instead of pausing to really think it over.

Without the messy things we have done in the past and continue to do today we wouldn't even be having this conversation on computers. Hell, in all likelihood we wouldn't even be alive. Striving towards a greener society is a noble goal to strive for, but not at the expense of cowering in terror until we answer every unanswered question. I am damn glad that my ancestors toiled through the industrial revolution, and I imagine that my grandchildren will be thankful that I toiled through my generation in a world that they will undoubtedly look back as ugly and messy. This is human progress.