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Weird New Fruits Could Hit Aisles Soon Thanks To Gene Editing (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Smooth or hairy, pungent or tasteless, deep-hued or bright: new versions of old fruits could be hitting the produce aisles as plant experts embrace cutting-edge technology, scientists say. While researchers have previously produced plants with specific traits through traditional breeding techniques, experts say new technologies such as the gene-editing tool Crispr-Cas9 could be used to bring about changes far more rapidly and efficiently. Among the genes flagged in the new study in the journal Trends in Plant Science are those behind the production of a family of substances known as MYBs, which are among the proteins that control whether other genes are switched on or off.
"MYBs are great targets because they are central to several consumer traits or features like color, flavor [and] texture," said Andrew Allan, a co-author of the review from the University of Auckland whose own projects include working on red-fleshed apples and changing the color of kiwi fruits. "Russet skin in apple and pear [is linked to MYBs]. Hairs on peaches but not nectarines -- another type of MYB." Dr Richard Harrison, head of genetics, genomics and breeding at the horticultural organization NIAB EMR, who was not involved in the article, said tweaking MYB genes or the way such genes are themselves controlled was a fruitful approach. Gene-editing of MYB genes and other genes could bring a host of benefits, Harrison said, adding: "There is a large opportunity to improve the nutritional profile of fruits and vegetables in the future using gene-editing technology, as well as other techniques." Such techniques, he said, introduce the same sort of DNA changes as plant breeders have introduced by artificially selecting traits that cropped up through spontaneous DNA mutation -- but much faster. Next week, the European Court of Justice will decide if or how plants that have been gene-edited will be regulated, and whether they will be treated like genetically modified plants. In April, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it will no longer regulate genetically altered plants, so long as the changes could have been produced through traditional plant-breeding techniques.
"MYBs are great targets because they are central to several consumer traits or features like color, flavor [and] texture," said Andrew Allan, a co-author of the review from the University of Auckland whose own projects include working on red-fleshed apples and changing the color of kiwi fruits. "Russet skin in apple and pear [is linked to MYBs]. Hairs on peaches but not nectarines -- another type of MYB." Dr Richard Harrison, head of genetics, genomics and breeding at the horticultural organization NIAB EMR, who was not involved in the article, said tweaking MYB genes or the way such genes are themselves controlled was a fruitful approach. Gene-editing of MYB genes and other genes could bring a host of benefits, Harrison said, adding: "There is a large opportunity to improve the nutritional profile of fruits and vegetables in the future using gene-editing technology, as well as other techniques." Such techniques, he said, introduce the same sort of DNA changes as plant breeders have introduced by artificially selecting traits that cropped up through spontaneous DNA mutation -- but much faster. Next week, the European Court of Justice will decide if or how plants that have been gene-edited will be regulated, and whether they will be treated like genetically modified plants. In April, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it will no longer regulate genetically altered plants, so long as the changes could have been produced through traditional plant-breeding techniques.
Stores just don't stock dozens of variations of every fruit and vegetable.
I'll have more stuff to avoid at the grocery store. Thanks Science!
People don't like change or unexpected tastes. There is a reason that green ketchup died.
A faaar better use would be to make healthy foods slightly more palatable without sacrificing it's high nutritional value. Sadly, I foresee this being used to make fruits far sweeter which would make them very unhealthy.
What we need the government to start doing is evaluating goods based on their heath impact and how addictive they are and then place a tax on the food that will later be used to pay for the healthcare you'll need from consuming them. Humans are bad a long-term decision making therefore turning the long-term decision into a short-term one helps people make better choices.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
If the change has to be something that could be achieved through breeding, there is no improvement worth making. It will still be a plant and will never achieve the ultimate goal of creating a slig that can take all of my organic garbage in one end and allow fresh pork butt to be sliced off the other forever and ever.
To GMO.
Can they edit creimer's genes so he isn't such a lardass with a micropenis?
Sorry, what?
I don't care how badly they mutilate the fruits and veggies JUST SO LONG AS THEY ARE LABELLED AS GMO. Let the market sort it out. What are the corporations hiding that they would fight tooth and nail against labels? Don't people have a simple right to know what they are buying and eating?
I think the most appropriate objection to GMOs is that Monsanto (now Bayer) uses them to lock farmers into hyper-exploitative contracts and uses heavy-handed legal tactics to enforce them, leading to collateral damage (farmers being wrongly sued for using unlicensed seeds) and suicide by farmers crumpling under the pressures exerted by Monsanto/Bayer.
On the GMO topic per se, I'm with the large number of scientists who can't see anything wrong with it. Gene splicing and editing are just new and different ways of doing what we've always done with crops. With technological developments like these, I think we're due for a review of our agricultural policies and laws but in the public interest, i.e. no corporate and lobby money allowed. But I guess that's just a pipe-dream.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Trump and his treasonous faggot weasel sons hardly qualify as humans. More like retarded, entitled non-reality faggots headed for the prison toilet.
Nothing new about using crispr for fruits. I've been using my crispr for fruits and vegetables for a long time. The drawer next to the crispr is where I keep my cheese and stuff. Milk goes on the top shelf, eggs in door.
I used to love red delicious apples. The skin was medium red, and they were sweet and crunchy.
But about 20 years ago, the red delicious apples in my area (SF Bay Area) changed to being dark red, not sweet, and sort of mushy.
I wish the researchers would bring back the good red delicious apples.
Should make for a great cage match. The Luddites are going to do whatever they can to stop these, because once people decide the new stuff is tasty there will be no stopping GMO everywhere. A good thing indeed with population heading towards 9 billion.
Trees with blue and pink leaves or green bark have hit the market this year. Some pretty wild stuff is already available.
like Andy DICK?
I for one welcome the coming zombie apocalypse after we genetically engineer food that mutates humans into brain eating half-dead creatures. Already we have engineered McDonalds food which never molds, undead humans are the next logical step.
https://xkcd.com/1387/
I hope that excludes sterile plants; it's difficult to imagine sterility caused by breeding within a species. Speaking of which, who owns these genetically modified plants?
Geneticists want money for their GMO seeds, providing an incentive to spread rust and mold infestations on farms using traditional seeds.
I love Pluots as much as the next person, but if you really want to get people (particularly parents) forking over money GMO some strawberry-flavored broccoli.
why not make broccoli-flavored strawberries instead?
You tell 'em, Comrade Wang!
Real strawberry taste is the result of hundreds of complex chemicals, spread out over even more genes, as is the taste of broccoli that has to be removed. Though it may eventually be possible to achieve, the taste of strawberries would probably clash with the texture of broccoli.
GMO changes tend to focus on inserting or tweaking a few specific genes, typically to produce more of some protein related to disease resistance, drought tolerance, vitamin production, etc.
A faaar better use would be to make healthy foods slightly more palatable ...
Just make food tasty again, that's all I am asking
The tomato we buy in supermarkets taste more and more like cardboard
If they can make our food more tasty, it would make our world that much better !
> On the GMO topic per se, I'm with the large number of scientists who can't see anything wrong with it.
Exactly. And then, not.
Scientifically, CRISPR is a big thing, incredibly cool. But I *very much don't want* to see all of this in the hands of greedy, investor capital fueled, soulless monsters (be it new aggressive startups or giants like Monsanto/Bayer, Syngenta & friends).
Therefore I'll continue to go out on the streets and rally against any kind of GMO foods, although I'm the very antithesis of a tree-hugging anti-vaccine nutjob (Monsanto's[1] PR department will try to pu the likes of me in this light, and it _works_, as can be seen by many reactions here on ./)
[1] Yeah, I know, they're called Bayer these days.
Making fruits and vegetables as nutritious and tasty as they used to be, not the perfect hard styrofoam flavorless baseballs sold now. Yeah, how about that.
http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Tomacco
In April, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it will no longer regulate genetically altered plants, so long as the changes could have been produced through traditional plant-breeding techniques.
How sciency!
I wonder who can't wait for all these hairy tasteless fruits.
I think there is a point in breeding crops the slow traditional way over several generations (of crops): You notice the faults with a breed of crop over some time, and you often have a larger number of different seeds to use for the next generation.
Of course you could do gene editing in a responsible, slow way too, but it gene editing is being sold on its speed and instant results.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I am not against GMO per se but we have to acknowledge that GMO unlike other cross breeding changes that have happened is that GMO changes have one thing against them and that is time. Selective changes that have happened already to the fruit we eat today have had time to test for any adverse effects.
We have to acknowledge the fact that anything we put in our stomach has the possbility to cause harm and the effects can manifest itself after a long time. There is always the possibility that something we eat today can kill us after 30 years or so.
This is because they pick the damn things when they are still unripe and green, then use ethylene gas to "artificially ripen" the color to that pathetic dark pink, not even red.
The cardboard you're eating is basically a rotten still unripe mushy green tomato.
You either have to grow them yourself or get them locally grown, assuming even your local roadstand source doesn't load them up with pesticides.
1: Article links to a study on social isolation, not to the actual cited study.
2: Much like Roundup Ready crops jumping farmers fields and the horroshow show-trials that resulted against farmers who never bought or planted Roundup ready crops, you have no real control over how genes move once outside the lab.
3: We've prooven pretty conclusively that the externality cost of the FDA not doing their jobs when it comes to experimenting on the public food sources is far greater than the oppertunity cost to both the public and the industry at large. Their job is to slow the change and make sure the public health is not impacted, but that also ensures industry revenues. One Historical example is of rGBH: In the late 90's everyone got so sick from milk that they cut it out of their diets and dairy sales dropped significantly enough the industry had to stop using it. A lot of the reason why you see the disclaimer on the milk bottle for rGBH is they are trying to reduce liability by marketing. What would've become obvious in an inexpensive lab setting on a 5-year trial became a total industry-wide nightmare. We have been engaging in the same exercise with corn and corn syrup due specifically to round-up ready crops for awhile, and there are other crops this is occuring on as well. The organics market, even though they can be quacky, is a response to experimenting on public food sources; people want to know about both the source and manufacture of their food stuffs but we don't have a government that enforces that and the industry by and large prefers to keep the public from knowing because the executive management makes their dollars on buying the cheapest products and dressing them up in fancy labels.
While there are tons of varieties of foods already in existence, only a tiny fraction have been made mechanically harvest-able. This is important for the illegal aliens and farm jobs Americans demand high pay for. Asparagus is labor intensive to harvest, but it has all sorts of healthy chemicals. Now, if Maize, which is mechanically harvest-able, was genetically engineered to have asparagus' healthy chemicals, Americans could eat healthy maize instead of Asparagus, even if there were mass deportations. Tomato plants could be genetically engineered to grow peaches, or strawberries.
Can they edit in fungus resistance and save the banana?
The story with tomatoes is in fact sad. However, the recent trend with apples is quite different. The Gala apple is a huge improvement over the Red Delicious (RD) in flavor, and has largely displaced it in markets. Plenty of new varieties of apples that are not quite as pretty as RD but are improved in texture and taste such as Honeycrisp, Pink Lady, Jazz, are increasingly dominant. And these apples are being outstripped even now by even newer varieties such as Snapdragon, Ruby Frost, Sweet Tango, and Smitten are giving consumers new choices that taste absolutely fantastic in comparison to RD.
A big difference though is that in apples, consumers love crispy firm texture, which makes apples durable in shipment and handling. Crispy and firm are not ideal at all for tomatoes or stone fruit--both of which have been and remain terrible when got from grocery stores.
--PM
It's mostly about transport times. If long-distance endpoint-to-endpoint transport can be made fast and not unduly expensive, I imagine you'll see fruit more often picked in a riper state and shipped in anti-crush containers. Rather than dumped into big boxes, hard and green, so that they can handle them like rocks.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
I've read that citrus fruits contain substances called fumarins, that when exposed to UV light can become carcinogenic.
I don't think reliable epidemiological studies have shown that citrus consumption and subsequent human exposure to sunlight increases cancer rates, but if they do, then we can reduce cancer incidence by removing fumarins from citrus. (Can, not necessarily should, they might provide health benefits that are greater than the risk.)
Right now, citrus is being saved from becoming commercially extinct by GMO. Naturally derived citrus production worldwide is being decimated by citrus greening--a disease to which apparently no natural citrus is resistant (some 50% of Florida's citrus production has been destroyed). Turns out that if you splice in a gene from spinach, the resulting GMO citrus is resistant to citrus greening.
Given the way agriculture is being done by humans nowadays, I think this sort of countermeasure to emerging plant pathogens is going to be absolutely required to ensure food security. Imagine the famine if an emerging wheat blight wipes out wheat production worldwide faster than breeding can develop resistant varieties. Now imagine if in one year, new wheat varieties that are resistant can be developed. You might have just saved human civilization.
--PeterM
The Monsanto problem may be the worst. The idea that a GMO-produced species can be patented makes GMO something to avoid. Monsanto makes glyphosate-tolerant crop strains so they can sell more glyphosate AND more crop seed. They use GMO so that they can then control the market and the farmer.
But there's also a second big problem that rarely gets discussed: The motive for these changes is always economic. Companies breed red tomatoes and spoil-resistant strawberries in order to make mass production more efficient, not to increase food quality or flavor.
Last week I bought some "field tomatoes" from NY at Whole Foods. I haven't bought tomatoes for months. They've been $4/#, look a perfect ketchup-red, but have no flavor and no juice. The non-altered tomatoes are far cheaper and they're delicious. In other words, GMO tech is not likely to bring us better produce. It will just bring us produce that looks good, ships well, doesn't spoil, has no flavor, and costs too much.
To focus only on the question of whether the actual gene splicing is safe misses the whole picture.
Weird Fruits? Really? In 2018?
I only eat non poisonous naturally accuring fruit.
"We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?" -- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang ,"Dynamics of Mind"
It tastes like GrandMa!
They talk about weird new fruits,
but what about strange new nuts?!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If you’re ancient like me you know bananas aren’t what they used to be. Bananas are cloned for propagation. Every Cavandish banana you eat is from a cloned plant. And they are dying off, again. What I’d like to see is some enterprising banana scientist, what a great visual, bring about a disease resistant version, well fungus resistant, of the much tastier and better shipping endurance, Gros Michel banana. If you’re old enough you know what I mean. Bananas on cornflakes didn’t need sugar then. The texture was better, and they did much better in shipping. But the Gros Michel was brought down by a fungus that slowly spread in the ground as tires and boot treads moved it about, an huge fields of bananas were cultivated. So using Genetic manipulation to introduce other banana strains fungus resistance to Gros Michel would be of benefit to all of banana eating kind.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Maybe next you can ban porn on the internet, because nobody wants that either.
You say 'bans', organized crime says 'profit centers'. Same thing, really.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Was there a point to this?
...look forward to the brocconana, the spinacheese, and the lemonyak!
Going OT here (I admit not RTFA but will comment anyway), talking with a friend that worked in fruit packaging/sorting and also some crop fields in south county in Santa Clara Valley before it became Silicon Valley. She mentioned one year all the apricots yield was not good, was it a bad season? Next year the yield was worse. So was everyone else and the cause was traced to pollution in the valley. I then thought, wow it has been years since I last ate an apricot.
mfwright@batnet.com
It's mostly about transport times.
At least for domestic produce, it really isn't. It's mostly about harvest times, and handling convenience. And it's funny you come to that conclusion because...
Rather than dumped into big boxes, hard and green, so that they can handle them like rocks.
Yes! And the reason they want to handle them like rocks is that all the food comes in at the same time, but people expect to have all the produce in their supermarket all year long. This is because people are lazy, and that makes them stupid (because they are too lazy to think.) They don't want to eat seasonally, because they would have to think about it. It's also because people are selfish, and don't give a shit about their impact on the world.
In order to keep produce coming all year, yes some is imported. But a lot is just held in storage facilities. They gas it for storage and they gas it again to force it to kind-of ripen. And you can't do any of this stuff if it isn't picked far before it is ripe. Otherwise it will just spoil, or be destroyed by the handling process, and then they can't sell it. It's not so much to do with transport time, because it only takes a few days to get from anywhere in the USA (for example) to anywhere else in the USA. This is only a big factor in international produce, and we really only import produce from countries which are very near to us so that's not such a big issue. Lots of Mexican tomatoes and avocados. The USA is a net exporter of foodstuffs.
Anyhoo... I moved to a property with some fruit trees recently, and I've really been enjoying eating fresh peaches and plums. I've decided I prefer non-freestone peaches, though. The flesh around the pit is not that great in Luther Burbank's variety and its descendants.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When can I buy one?
Ever watch Ray Comfort eat a banana? He looks like an ape.