Breeders Create Marketable B-Type Avocados Using 42-Million-Year-Old Flowering Gene
Updated
Updated · Boing Boing · Jul 31
Breeders Create Marketable B-Type Avocados Using 42-Million-Year-Old Flowering Gene
3 articles · Updated · Boing Boing · Jul 31
Summary
Breeders can now develop B-type avocado varieties that both pollinate groves and produce fruit consumers want to buy, reducing the trade-off growers faced with low-value pollinizer trees.
SDMYB, a gene conserved for 42 million years, controls the timing of avocado flowers’ female and male phases, letting breeders target whether a variety behaves as an A-type or B-type.
Avocado flowers open twice over 2 days—first as female, later as male—and A- and B-type varieties alternate morning versus afternoon timing, a pattern that boosts cross-pollination.
Hass, the dominant commercial avocado, is an A-type, so growers plant B-type companions to raise yields; marketable B-types could free up space and resources now used by less profitable buddy trees.
The advance could also shorten breeding work by letting developers bypass much of the roughly 10-year wait needed to identify a tree’s flowering type.