Maximum Yield USA 2015 January | Page 34

MAX FACTS growing tips, news and trivia Making Better French Fries A potato genetically engineered to reduce the amounts of a potentially harmful ingredient in French fries and potato chips has been approved for commercial planting, says the USDA. The potato’s DNA has been altered so that less of a chemical called acrylamide, which is suspected to cause cancer in people, is produced when the potato is fried. The new potato also resists bruising, a characteristic long sought by potato growers and processors. The biotech tubers were developed by the J. R. Simplot Company, a priva tely held company based in Boise, Idaho, which was the initial supplier of frozen French fries to McDonald’s in the 1960s and is still a major supplier. The potato is one of a new wave of genetically modified crops that aim to provide benefits to consumers, not just to farmers, as the widely grown biotech crops like herbicide-tolerant soybeans and corn do. (Source: nytimes.com) Space Plants Return to Earth Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Botany were happy to greet a truck carrying small containers holding more than 1,000 frozen plants that germinated and grew aboard the International Space Station. When Simon Gilroy’s team first inspected the plants at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, they saw exactly what they wanted: petri dishes holding seedlings that sprouted and grew in a weightless environment. After their arrival in Madison last November, the plants went directly into a deep freeze. After being thawed in a few months, researchers will use the plant’s RNA to measure the activity of approximately 30,000 genes. Half of the plants will become subjects in Simon’s longstanding exploration of the genetic control of the proteins that enable plants to grow in zero gravity. The other half will be added to NASA’s geneLAB, an open-source-based research model accessible by all interested researchers. (Source: news.wisc.edu) Parts of the Pomegranate’s History More than 8,000 years ago, the pomegranate became one of the first cultivated fruits. Since then, the pomegranate has traveled the globe and impacted major civilizations throughout history. For example, pomegranates figured prominently in Greek myths. In one of the most famous, Hades used the fruit to tempt Persephone, daughter of Zeus, into marriage. More than 1,000 years later in 1589, King Henry IV of France used the pomegranate for his heraldic badge, accompanied by the motto “sour, yet sweet.” He compared the nature of the fruit with his belief that a king should temper severity with mildness. When shopping for yours, select pomegranates by weight, not by color. The heavier the pomegranate, the more juice it contains. Pomegranates are only picked when they are perfectly ripe on the inside and the outside of a ripe pomegranate can vary from pink to a deep ruby red. (Source: pomwonderful.com) 32 Maximum Yield USA | January 2015