Chronicle Online e-News
The time is ripe for an apple that tastes like berries and one that
doesn't brown
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/June08/Brown.apples.j
g.html
June 5, 2008
By Jeanne Griffith
cunews@cornell.edu
Mention an apple and most people will immediately associate the word
with a crisp, juicy, sweet-tart red fruit. But ask Cornell fruit
geneticist Susan Brown about apples, and she'll share visions of deep
red flesh or skin patterned like feathers on a bird's back, of
flavors like anise, berries or roses. She'll talk of apples loaded
with cancer-preventive antioxidants or as much vitamin C as an
orange, that don't brown when cut or go soft in storage.
At the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station (NYSAES) in
Geneva, N.Y., these apples already exist, and new possibilities --
whether exotic, delicious, kind of weird or just plain awful (think
gasoline, nail-polish remover or soap) -- are literally endless.
Every seed holds a mystery
Apples are as infinitely variable as the number of seeds they produce
the world over, and planting a seed will never produce a tree just
like the one it came from. Though a tree confers the same qualities
on all the apples it bears, the five to 10 seeds inside each apple
are all unique offspring.
The only way to replicate a desirable apple is to graft a cutting
from the tree that produced it onto some sturdy rootstock, explains
Brown, the Herman M. Cohn Professor of Horticultural Sciences. The
trees that yield the varieties popular with consumers are all clones
of solitary originals that, in the old days at least, probably grew
by chance in a cider orchard or wilderness.
Though chance and intuition will always play a role in the birth of
some great apples, creating superior new varieties that will catch on
with consumers involves a heavy dose of science.
The apple-breeding program at NYSAES dates back 125 years and has
reaped 63 cultivars, including the Empire, Macoun, Jonagold and
Cortland.
"When I came into the program in 1990, I realized that a lot of our
varieties were based on McIntosh or Empire because they are ideally
suited to our location," Brown says. But she was concerned about the
lack of genetic diversity in commercial apples. "I have really sought
to save traits that I think will add to our knowledge of genes and
how they can be deployed. The rootstock breeding program also does
this."
Brown arrived at Cornell just as revolutionary advances in molecular
genetic technology were sparking the College of Agriculture and Life
Sciences-led Genomics Initiative, now known as the New Life Sciences
Initiative.
"In 1990 there were probably only 28 families of genes," Brown
recalls. "A family of genes would be, for example, several genes for
scab resistance. We didn't have a lot that we could use to make more
efficient what was admittedly a long, expensive process. But now we
have genetic markers that we can use. I can show you a small seedling
and tell you whether that little seedling, when it grows up, is going
to have red or yellow fruit, or have a gene for disease resistance or
not. I can get scab resistance without any problem at all."
Brown also hopes to make the apple business more profitable for the
state's 674 growers. She works closely with New York stakeholders,
both to find out what improvements they would like to see in apples
and to have their help with grower trials of promising new varieties.
"We have fruit in grower trials pretty much all throughout New York,"
she says.
Branching out
She also works to create trees that not only produce well but
successfully resist multiple insect pests and pathogens, and do it
all while beautifully enhancing a variety of landscapes.
Apple trees, it turns out, don't have to look like a trunk with
upward, out-spreading branches. Brown has fruit-bearing trees that
are perfectly columnar, others that weep and some crosses of these
types that are both columnar and weeping. Her favorite type looks
like a bush, with dense, upward-thrusting branches of uniform length.
"All the branches stop at almost the same point," she notes. "We
spend a lot of time pruning trees, trying to bring them down so that
growers can get in there with ladders." She even has one that is only
a foot high and already bearing fruit.
With so much of the apple's enormous potential yet to explore, she
and her colleagues are excited about beefing up Cornell's tree-fruit
genomics program with three new genomicists, the first of which will
be an expert in the genetics of tree architecture.
"Our goal is to establish a center in tree fruit genomics," she says.
"We have the USDA germplasm repository, with more than 2,000
accessions of apple, my breeding program, the rootstock breeding
program, and the USDA grape group in the next building is a center of
excellence in grape genomics," she says. In addition, "Every year we
harvest at least 10,000 seeds. We have 33 acres of seedlings, which
is a huge amount, and we have to evaluate them for many
characteristics. We're one of the largest programs in the world."
Another goal for Brown is to create an apple that can convert a new
generation of children to eating fruit. She got an idea about what
might work when she put crabapples in her kids' lunches as a joke and
they came home raving about how good they were. "Kids like more fully
flavored apples with higher acidity -- that's how Granny Smith became
popular," she says. "My goal is not to get kids to eat crabapples but
to develop large varieties that are really powerful. I want to make
apples that are really desirable to the younger market, because if
they don't eat them now, then they're never going to eat them."
And if they don't eat them, there's no end to what they'll be missing.
=
This article has been abridged from College of Agriculture and Life
Sciences News.
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