Emily Kwong

Okay, Anna, so we're going to talk about apple breeding, how to make new kinds of apples.

I actually have no idea how this happens at all, like zero understanding.

Can you help me out?

Totally.

Let's start with like the basics, like how apples breed in nature.

All right.

So when an apple tree is still in flower, bees visit, right?

Right.

They drop their pollen.

That flower combines its genetic material with the pollen, sheds its petals, and that apple flower becomes an apple, which you can kind of think of like a fertilized ovary.

Oh, an apple is an ovary?

Yeah.

And then the seed inside that ovary, inside that apple, is totally unique.

Just like you're a genetic combination of your two parents, an apple seed is a genetic combination of its two parents.

And its two parents are like the apple tree and then the pollen from some other tree.

Exactly.

But the bees are really busy, right?

So they bring a lot of different pollen from a lot of different trees.

Okay, so it's like a Maury Povich episode up in these apples.

A Maury what?