Apple Genetic Collection Provides Avenues in Time. Rod Bain has more coming up on This Land of Ours.
One of the world’s largest and most diverse collections of apple cultivars and genetic materials can be found at a USDA agricultural research station in New York State.
“There’s about 5000 unique accessions that we keep. And the composition really is 1400 of those are named cultivars, so they have a unique history. They’ve been used in dessert or cider making. That’s not very many. So the rest of them are these wild materials or hybrids that are like maybe not the thing you think of when you go to the grocery store, but our collection is uniquely wild,” said USDA geneticist Bed Gutierrez
Yet the collection’s importance, according to Gutierrez, is within its materials to develop future varieties.
“It’s what it’s going to save apple breeding forward in the future. These are the unique disease resistance traits or fruit quality. So, a lot of the novel flavors that we get in some of these apple hybrids come from these wild parents,” he said.
The collection also offers historical and cultural connections with its diverse worldwide representation.
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Sabrina Halvorson
National Correspondent / AgNet Media, Inc.
Sabrina Halvorson is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and public speaker who specializes in agriculture. She primarily reports on legislative issues and hosts The AgNet Weekly podcast. Sabrina is a native of California’s agriculture-rich Central Valley.