How we could make fruit taste - and look - better

A family of genetic controls could hold the answer to making fruit and vegetables healthier, better tasting, or more visually appealing - like this red-fleshed apple. Photo / Plant & Food Research

We could make our fruit and veges healthier, tastier - or even just different colours - by flicking a few switches in their genetic control boards, Kiwi scientists say.

In a report published today in academic journal Trends in Plant Science, Professor Andrew Allan and Dr Richard Espley set out the potential for a range of new fruits and vegetables on our supermarket shelves.

The key lay in a single family of genetic controls, called MYB transcription factors, which are involved in traits like appearance, flavour, texture and nutritional content.

In many fruiting plants, these controls are responsible for maintaining colour compounds that are linked to health benefits that are found in the fruit's skin and, to a lesser extent, its flesh.

By changing or selecting for changes in the activity of these transcription factors, the plant could produce more of these healthy compounds throughout the fruit.

Allan said that studies had shown pigments such as anthocyanins and carotenoids were thought to offer health and dietary benefits.

"Changes in key MYB transcription factors could turn the colourless flesh of certain fruits into one with colour," he said.

"It could significantly increase the content of pigments per fruit serving, resulting in a possible step change in health benefits."

Besides colour, MYBs was also involved in taste and flavour, along with the texture of the flesh and hair formation on the skin.

Better understanding how MYBs were regulated, the scientists explained, could open the door to breeding and producing completely new categories of fruits and vegetables, with traits that consumers desired.

Healthier produce that looked, tasted and stored better might even encourage shoppers to choose plant products over heavily-processed synthetic food.

While modern breeding programmes could sometimes take decades to perfect such traits in cultivars, new technologies such as gene editing could quickly produce plants without needing to insert any new genetic material into them.

"These techniques offer ways of providing large changes in the health potential of plants, but challenge the perception of what is natural and what is not," Allan and Espley wrote.

"Providing the consumer with new cultivars that have measurable benefits may help in the public debate on 'future plants'."

But any form of genetic modification remains heavily regulated in New Zealand, and to date no fresh produce sourced from here has undergone such treatment.

It remains a contentious issue with many questioning what side effects could come from fiddling with the make-up of food.

The Ministry for the Environment's 2017 Regulatory Stewardship Strategy stated genetic modification had been noted as an area "likely to have significant development in the coming years", and that officials would provide the minister "with advice on appropriate changes to New Zealand's GM policy".

Former science advisor to the Prime Minister Sir Peter Gluckman raised the issue again this month saying it was time to restart the debate and that the science was as safe as it ever would be.

While the biotech sector has also aired concerns about New Zealand being left behind due to its strict regulations, there were no immediate plans to change current laws.