<
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/sep/07/cavendish-banana-genetically-modified-qcav-4>
"When two biotechnologists fly from Brisbane to Darwin on Saturday, they will
drive the Kakadu road to Humpty Doo and eat what has the potential to become
one of the more consequential mouthfuls of banana in the history of the
planet’s most popular fruit.
Whoever bites first will not only become the first person to taste a
genetically modified fruit grown in Australia, they shall have the first taste
of the first GM banana approved for commercial production anywhere in the
world.
The banana in question, dubbed QCAV-4, was granted final approval for human
consumption by the Australian government in April. But at that time none of the
47 GM Cavendish banana plants produced by the Queensland University of
Technology’s banana biotechnology program were bearing fruit.
The trial plantation near Humpty Doo is the result of 20 years of research and
has borne bunches consistently over the last seven years. A team led by Prof
James Dale regularly handled them – but they couldn’t risk so much as a nibble
until regulators gave the green light.
“[QCAV-4] is a Cavendish,” Dale says. “The bananas look the same, they feel the
same, they peel the same, they smell the same and, we’re 99.99% sure, they are
going to taste exactly the same.
“It’s just that we haven’t been able to eat them.”
The reason Dale can be supremely confident that the QCAV-4’s flavour is
identical to the Cavendish banana – which accounts for 97% of bananas grown in
Australia and 99% of those exported in the world – is because his team has only
removed a single gene from the 25,000 genes in a wild species of banana and
inserted it into the chromosome of the Cavendish.
“And the gene that we put in has nothing to do with fruit quality at all,” Dale
says.
Instead, the gene in question’s qualities relate to disease resistance."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
