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Bananas are on the list of the top five most-harvested fruits with more than 100 million metric tons produced yearly. It’s not surprising that this yellow tropical fruit ranks among the most popular fruits around the world. Bananas are packed with vitamins and minerals, and have a tough peel that makes it easy to store.
Now, Tropic, a Norwich, UK-based AgriTech company, has developed a slow-growing banana that can stay fresh longer. reported yahoo!life. The great news is that the banana can stay yellow for 2 hours after it is peeled. This is a big gamechanger for the pre-cut fruit industry.
Gilad Gershon, co-founder and chief exeutive of Tropic, told yahoo!life, “People have been trying to improve the Cavendish [banana variety] for years with very little success … after several years of development, we started production of [non-browning] seedlings about a year ago, and we’re now starting to offer significant quantities of these banana plants to farmers.”
Bananas in the Bin
Banana waste is a global issue. In fact, millions of tons of bananas are thrown away every year because of the fruit's short shelf life..
“Food waste is a big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. It’s very bad, clearly,” Gershon told The Guardian. “Bananas are the fourth biggest crop globally, but also one where the perishability is very high. Some estimates say that 50 percent of the bananas grown are never eaten.”
But Gershon’s company is working to change that statistic. Tropic researchers employ gene editing techniques to create fruits and vegetables that are more robust and stay fresh for longer, according to The Guardian.
This banana, which is already approved to be sold in five countries, including the US, also is likely to turn brown less when it gets bumped around, for example when being shipped overseas.
Gene Editing
Bananas can’t be selectively bred by farmers in the same way that other staple crops are. This is due to the fact that most popular banana varieties have no seeds.
“Bananas are asexual,” Gershon explained “There’s no real breeding in bananas. We’re eating today the same bananas as our grandparents were eating in the 1950s.”
Because bananas are cloned rather than planted from seeds, Gershon said, “The only real opportunity we have to adjust the banana to meet the challenges the industry is facing is through gene editing.”
Gerhon’s team created the non-browning banana by editing a specific gene that causes the banana to produce an enzyme involved in ripening and browning called polyphenol oxidase. This specific enzyme has already been targeted when producing apples, tomatoes, melons, kiwi, and mushrooms that stay fresher for longer.
Other companies are also working to tackle food waste through gene editing for freshness. Dr Martin Kottackal of the Khalifa Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Abu Dhabi said that they are working on creating tomatoes, lettuce, and eggplant with less ethylene, a substance that signals ripening in fruits. “They're all in the pipeline,” Kottockal shared.
Professor Johanathn Jones, who is working on a gene-edited, blight-resistant potato, for Sainsbury Laboratory said that gene-editing holds a lot of promise for creating better produce.
“In agriculture and food, it’s not one big problem, it’s a lot of little problems and reasonable-sized problems,” Jones said. “There are solutions to all of them in genetics. It allows you to approach, in a faster and more focused way, solutions to these problems.”
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