Imagine plucking an apple that is tall and narrow and native to the Black Sea region. Dark purple Black Oxford apples are similar to large plums and can be found in an adjacent arboreal row.
There are more than 1,000 varieties of Malus fruit, which is bursting with an autumn-themed rainbow of red, orange, yellow, green and even purple, in this scene.
The apples won't end up in pies. Scientists there are working on understanding the genetics that result in this bonanza of apple diversity, with the ultimate goal of improving the fruit in different ways, with longer shelf-life in the face of changing climates.
It was great to be able to walk through what is basically the United Nations of apples and see the world's genetic diversity all in one place.
Cosmic Crisps from Washington State, SnapDragons from New York and Honeycrisps from Minnesota are some of the popular apples in grocery stores today. There are many varieties of apples in the world. Future generations of apples may come from research orchards like the one in Nova Scotia.
He has an allergy to apples that makes his mouth itch if they are cooked, so he didn't start out as an apple genes enthusiast. He used to work on human genetics at the school of medicine. He moved to the valley because of his love for his wife who makes wine. The main crop in the area was apples. He got a Canada Research Chair position at the Faculty of Agriculture at Dalhousie University in 2011.
There isn't a global census of apple preservation efforts. The Nova Scotia orchard was not included in a report published by the Global Crop Diversity Trust because it was not a complete list. Half of the 40 surveyed orchards are in North America or Europe, according to the report. Many contemporary apple varieties are thought to have originated in the Caucasus Region.
A global organization of those who cultivate these collections is called for in the report. We are far away from having an international coordination of apple diversity maintenance.
One of the world's largest apple collections is managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in New York. A majority of the apple varieties are planted in an apple grove. Each apple's tissue is stored in a giant freezer so that if a tree is damaged by weather or disease, researchers can come back and replant it.
Over half of the apples in the U.S.D.A. collection are wild.
"Though not immediately appealing from a fruit quality perspective, these wild apples have tremendous potential for disease resistance, climate adaptation or other unexpected high- value traits and are critical for understanding the evolution of Malus species and the domestication history of modern apples."
In Nova Scotia, it took six years to create the Apple biodiversity collection. It involved planting 4,000 trees, ripping them up after a year, storing them in a giant fridge during the winter, and replanting them in the summer. They put labels on the trees and waited.
The Canadians worked with the U.S.D.A. to get the raw materials. Having a lot of the same types in both places gives some insight into how the trees would perform in other places. The Nova Scotia orchard was designed to make their data more relevant by using randomization, replication and other factors.
The site in Nova Scotia helps to broaden the scope of possible future apples by studying the genetics of various apples.
Apples are firm. Either way, it's more sweet or more sour. Francois Laurens at the French national research institute for agriculture said that apples can have red flesh.
The five to seven year wait before a tree produces fruit makes apples more difficult to work with than other crops. It takes about 15 years to breed and test a new apple.
James Luby, a professor of horticultural sciences at the University of Minnesota, said that new varieties could be on the market for 20 to 25 years.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Luby was involved in the development of the honeycrisp apple. The Honeycrisp hit the market in the early 1990s, but he began working at the center in 1982. Some growers and journalists were skeptical about the need for new apples.
The Honeycrisp apple was very different from the other apples on the market.
Honeycrisp and many other apples are the result of a technique called controlled hybridization, which involves taking pollen from one apple tree and placing it on the flower of another. Susan K. Brown is a professor at Cornell University and leads the nation's oldest apple breeding program.
Some recent apple successes from Dr. Brown, the research specialist Kevin Maloney and their large team of collaborators at Cornell include the RubyFrost and snapDragon types. They were developed in a partnership.
The variety for having an explosion of flavor was one of the reasons why the Cornell group chose Firecracker.
Genetic modification methods have been pursued by other researchers. Fuji, Gala and Granny Smith apples are included in the G.M.O.'s.
The technique of cutting and editing genomes is different from genetic modification. It's possible that the future of apples and food will be influenced by CRISPR. David Chagne of the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research said, "when you want to understand the function of a gene, you can disrupt it usingCRISPR."
An Italian group demonstrated in a study that it could be used to reduce susceptibility to a disease.
It isn't a paring knife. New Zealand does not allow the use ofCRISPR for commercial food. It's difficult to regenerate a plant from a single cell.
The challenge of the apple's long development period is still an obstacle even though the Canadian group is getting into the game.
It may be a while before people see these things on the shelf, but it is coming down the line. Our group wants to be the ones that start it all.
Researchers need to sample apples to make sure they are ready to be picked. Apple experts will bite, chew, taste and spit if they don't like it.
About 800 apples may have been tasted in the name of research by a PhD student. There are apples with hints of banana, citrus fruits and even one called Cotton Candy that tastes exactly like cotton candy, she said.
She said that the samples of the apple tasted bad.
The Nova Scotia lab is involved in preserving biodiversity. She said that it was important that we kept as much crop diversity as possible so that we could use it to breed new varieties that were adapted to our changing world.
A lot of publications have been written about the genetics of apples because of the basic genetic sequence of the trees in the Apple Biodiversity Collection. There are genes that regulate how much apples change when they are kept in storage.
There is no single genetic modification that will change apples.
He wished he had that trait. It would be great to make it taste like a banana and look like anavo Have it yield three times as much and be resistant to all the diseases?
He said that it would be great. Science doesn't work like that.
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