Fruit ‘could be made yummier’
Just a little genetic tinkering could enhance flavour, improve appearance, report says
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3. How many years later did National choose a woman to be our PM?
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Fruit and veges could become healthier, tastier and even more colourful by flicking a few genetic switches, New Zealand scientists say. In a report published today Professor Andrew Allan and Dr Richard Espley set out the potential for a range of new fruits and vegetables on our supermarket shelves.
But the genetic changes remain off limits under New Zealand law and there are no reform plans at present.
The key to changing fruit colour and taste lies in a single family of genetic controls which are involved in traits such as appearance, flavour, texture and nutritional content.
In many fruiting plants, these controls maintain colour compounds that are linked to health benefits that are found in the fruit’s skin and, to a lesser extent, its flesh.
By changing or selecting for changes, the plant could produce more of these healthy compounds throughout the fruit.
Allan said that studies had shown that pigments such as anthocyanins and carotenoids were thought to offer health and dietary benefits.
The controls are called MYB transcription factors, and could create colour in pale fruit.
Allan said: “It could significantly increase the content of pigments per fruit serving, resulting in a possible step change in health benefits.”
Besides colour, MYBs also involved taste and flavour, flesh texture and hair formation on the skin.
Better understanding how MYBs Researcher Andrew Allan were regulated, the scientists explained, could open the door to breeding and producing completely new categories of fruits and vegetables, with traits that consumers desired.
Healthier produce that looked, tasted and stored better might even encourage shoppers to choose plant products over heavily-processed synthetic food. While modern breeding programmes could sometimes take decades to perfect such traits in cultivars, new technologies such as gene editing could quickly produce plants without needing to insert any new genetic material into them.
“These techniques offer ways of providing large changes in the health potential of plants, but challenge the perception of what is natural and what is not,” Allan and Espley wrote in the journal in academic journal Trends in Plant Science.
“Providing the consumer with new cultivars that have measurable benefits may help in the public debate on ‘future plants’.”
But any form of genetic modification remains heavily regulated in New Zealand, and to date no fresh produce sourced from here has undergone such treatment. The Ministry for the Environment’s 2017 Regulatory Stewardship Strategy stated genetic modification had been noted as an area “likely to have significant development in the coming years”.
The stewardship strategy added that officials would provide the minister “with advice on appropriate changes to New Zealand’s GM policy”.
While the biotech sector had also aired concerns about New Zealand being left behind due to its strict regulations, there were no immediate plans to change current laws.