Plant genome and nutritional quality
6:43 pm in environmental impact, Plants, questions, Seeking Advice, Starting Seeds, Uncategorized by John Elliott
I would like to know more about the availability of wild genomes of popular fruits and vegetables because of the quality of nutrition from the commercially hybridization of available plants are not as good. I do not know a great deal of Botany but I have learned that most if not all of the fruits and vegetables we eat here in the US have been hybridized to genomes that are better marketed and more profitable for the industrial food companies sacrificing nutrition and taste in the process. I see no reason why we can’t get these wild genomes of plants to grow ourselves, I personally want to grow strawberries. I uncovered this article about strawberries that had some very interesting information confirming my suspicions. Here are a few exerts from the article of interest.
The quantity and quality of bioactive compounds possessed by fruit is strictly related to fruit genotype (Scalzo et al., 2005a; Wu et al., 2006; Du et al., 2009).
Genotype is also very important in determining for nutritional and nutraceutical quality as already described in a large number of works carried on the evaluation of fruit nutritional parameters (Scalzo et al., 2005b; Du et al., 2009; Wang et al., 2002; Borochov-Neori et al., 2009; Hakkinen and Torronen, 2000; Capocasa et al., 2008).
Of peculiar interest is also the difference found among cultivated and 9 wild species. Wild species have higher level of nutritional attributes when compared whit their respective cultivated varieties, but at the same time they have a loss of other important fruit quality traits, such as for example fruit size and firmness. Thus, wild germplasm has an important role as a source of genes to improve fruit nutritional and nutraceutical quality (Wang and Lewers, 2007)
The link to the PDF article;
http://openarchive.univpm.it/jspui/bitstream/123456789/324/1/Tesi.Diamanti.pdf
If anyone has any information, incite I would be very interested to learn.
Tepins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsicum_annuum_var._glabriusculum
There are wild varieties from a few different regions.
Hi John , in Australia the Diggers Club (www.diggers.com.au) are my source of organic heirloom seeds and plants. In the USA, you can contact the Seed Savers Exchange, a garden charity trust. Also the Royal Horticultural Society in The UK manages the worlds largest horticultural library.
Don’t buy at large outlets which stock Monsanto and Syngenta but seek out the diverse genomes structures of the 25,000 rescued heirloom varieties from Seed Savers.