“Besting Johnny Appleseed: With a Few Tricks, and a Lot of Patience, Fruit Geneticists Are Undoing the Work of an American Legend”, 2010-04-16 (; backlinks; similar):
[Review of modern apple breeding techniques: genome sequencing enables selecting on seeds rather than trees by predicting taste & robustness, saving years of delay; this also allows avoiding the ‘GMO’ stigma by crossbreeding (quickly moving genes into new apple trees without direct genetic editing using genomic selection), such as a “fast-flowering gene” to accelerate maturation during evaluation but then select it out for the final tree; the creation of “The Gauntlet”, a greenhouse deliberately stocked with as many pathogens as possible, provides a stress test to weed out weak sapling as quickly as possible; and buds can be cryogenically preserved to cut down storage costs by more than an order of magnitude.]
Until recently, geneticists, their skills honed on Arabidopsis and other quick-breeding flora, avoided fruit-tree research like a blight. Of the 11,000 US field tests on plants with transgenic genes 1987–17200420ya, just 1% focused on fruit trees. That’s partly because of the slow pace. Whereas vegetables like corn might produce two harvests each summer, apple trees need eons—around 5 years—to produce their first fruit, most of which will be disregarded as ugly, bitter, or squishy. But everything in apple breeding is about to change. An Italian team plans to publish the decoded apple genome this summer, and scientists are starting to single out complex genetic markers for taste and heartiness. In some cases the scientists even plan, by inserting genes from other species, to eliminate the barren juvenile stage and push fruit trees to mature rapidly, greatly reducing generation times.