Anthocyanins make apples red, and make people healthy, through their antioxidant action. Now we know where the gene which controls anthocyanin production in apples is located, because scientists at CSIRO in Australia measured how much different genes were expressed as differently coloured fruits ripened. This opens the way for marker-assisted selection, as colour can now be predicted even in seedlings. It seems that apple sales have been pretty flat lately, but that launching a new variety can sometimes give them a boost. That could now be easier. Now if only the same sort of intensity of effort could be directed at the marula, say.
Bananas at school
The Rainforest Alliance is tooting its own horn about the value of bananas as a teaching tool, in an item about its ideas for using the banana as a basis for several school activities. Intended for young children in non-tropical countries, the ideas struck me as pretty entertaining, and infinitely expandable. Bananas as the basis of surveys and measurement, geography, history, even a bit of botany. There are other possibilities too, only hinted at or completely ignored. But wouldn’t it be cool if other crops were used this way, not as object lessons in themselves, but as the basis for studying all sorts of things?
That, by the way, is Gros Michel, which I had the pleasure of tasting for the first time earlier this year. Just the shift from Gros Michel to Cavendish opens up all sorts of pedagocic possibilities.
Cranberries vs bacteria caught on film
If you thought the video of the cranberry harvest entertaining, you might also enjoy seeing bacteria succumb to all that cranberry goodness. ScienCentral has the gore-fest on film (as it were).
Thanking the cranberry
Cultivating cranberries (Vaccinium spp) is pretty weird, involving as it does constructing beds by scraping off the topsoil and replacing it with sand, building dykes around them, and then flooding them at harvest time to collect the floating berries after threshing the vines. The crop is always in the news around this time of year because it is an important item on the menu of the Thanksgiving meal in the US, as a tangy accompaniment to roast turkey. Which is why the National Geographic website has posted this great video about the harvesting process.
The price of pineapples
A long story in The Guardian describes how pineapple growing is turning sour in Costa Rica. There’s an introduction about how Del Monte’s more tasty and nutritious Gold variety, bred by Hawaii’s Pineapple Research Institute in the 1970s, replaced Smooth Cayenne in the 1990s. But the real point of the article is to expose the dreadful conditions endured by workers on a Costa Rican plantation servicing a number of major British importers, mainly supermarkets. There are also serious environmental concerns over the recent expansion of the crop in the country.