Extra: How apples are engineered
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Future Proof Extra with Jonathan McRae. Proudly supported by Research Ireland on Newstalk. Welcome back to Future Very Fun News Talk. This is our weekly science program here on the station. I hope you're enjoying it. If you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email us, science at newstalk.com. Now, GMO foods are, of course, a controversial subject. A lot of people would seem a little reluctant to consume something that has been altered or re-engineered by humans. The only problem with that logic is that almost everything you can buy to eat in your local supermarket, apples, oranges, everything, has been engineered to some degree, including that humble apple in your lunchbox. And Kate Evans is professor in the Department of Horticulture at Washington State University.
They make a lot of apples. And she's the woman behind a whole new breed. It's called the Sunflower. She joins me now. Kate, welcome to the program.
Thank you.
What is the significance of genetically modified foods in our diet?
It's great to join you and talk about apples.
Yeah. So apples, have they changed a lot since before, since, I don't know, when they were fully natural and we hadn't, you know, even thought about crossbreeding or anything like our apples is dramatically different in the same way as a chihuahua is dramatically different to a wolf.
Yeah, well, you know, in some parts, right? So the apple itself, if you think about why the tree produces an apple, the whole point is for the seed to spread, right? That's what a tree wants to do. That's why we have an apple. And so the evolutionary perspective of that tree is, well, you have to make the apple attractive for people to eat or for animals to eat. So those seeds get spread. So in the big scheme of things, then, yeah, you know, an apple is an apple. We want to be able to eat it. But certainly from the wild apples that were around in Europe, most of those are very small crab apple types. And that's not what we're seeing and we want to eat. We want something that's a little tastier than that.
And so, I mean, did sweet apples just not exist at all? Because I'm wondering how we got, we went from, you know, bitter apples of olden days to something as incredibly sweet as a pink lady. Like, did we not need sweet apples to breed with the bitter apples to get something like the pink lady? Yeah.
Absolutely, yeah. So the sweet apple origins are mostly from the sort of Kazakhstan area, that part of the world. Yeah, really interestingly, the perspective is that they spread through the Silk Route, you know, that whole sort of trafficking of materials that moved across into Europe. And that's really where we got the sweet apples from. And still... 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.
Yeah. And so the sweetness that we have, that's come from essentially crossbreeding. There's not too much. I mean, sorry, I always have to preface that question because there always is way more to learn about it than I thought. But I was going to say there's not really much to think about when it comes to how we have modern apples in that we just crossbreed one plant with another and get a... a slightly sweeter or a slightly redder or a slightly less pippy fruit. Is that right?
Well, yeah, I like your term, Nick. We just do that. Yes. We just do that.
Is that hard?
How have apples evolved through human intervention?
Is it a hard thing to do?
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.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:50
2
What is the significance of genetically modified foods in our diet?
0:50–3:48
3
How have apples evolved through human intervention?
3:48–9:44
4
Where do sweet apples originate from?
9:44–15:54
5
What is the process of crossbreeding apples like?
15:54–17:11