Kate Evans

The wild type of apples, Malasaversii, is the species that is out in Kazakhstan, still in forests there, are typically a little larger than the crabapple types that we know, and they're often quite sweet.

Well, yeah, I like your term, Nick.

We just do that.

Yes.

We just do that.

Well, technically, the actual process of cross-hybridization is not difficult.

I mean, that is what the bee is doing all the time.

It's just that me as a plant breeder and other plant breeders, what we're doing is we're trying to do that in a controlled way.

So we're looking at choosing two parent varieties that we would consider combined together have got the sort of characteristics that we would like to see

in an improved offspring.

So therefore, we're taking pollen from one

one parental variety and just dusting it onto the flowers of the other and then patiently waiting for that fruit to be produced and the seeds inside that fruit are what we want because those are half maternal and half paternal.

It's sexual reproduction, basically.

And then my job is growing those seeds up.

Well, the tough bit is choosing the two parents, right?

What are your targets?

Choose your two parents.

And then

grow those seeds up and do a lot of evaluation to ultimately select the best individual because I'm not changing those seeds in any way.

My job is not the engineering side.