New types of vegetables can be developed through plant skin grafting

New techniques for producing fruits and vegetables with one varieties of skin and another meaty skin can make crops more resistant due to pests and droughts.

Many of the fruits and vegetables we eat come from grafted plants created by blocking off one plant and replacing it with another plant. What makes grafting useful is that even plants that are too far associated with hybridization can be implanted together. For example, you can graft the desired variety of fruit plants onto another type of rootstock that is resistant to pests and diseases.

Very occasionally, buds arise from the junction between grafted plants, two strange mixtures called graft chimeras, with the outer layer of one plant and the inside of another plant. This can occur because shoots arise from three different stem cell layers at the tip, one of which forms the skin of the plant. Coincidentally, shoots from the graft junction result in a mixture of stem cell types from two plants.

Usually, to create a specific type of grafted plant, you need to run the graft for each graft you want to grow. However, graft chimeras can be reproduced by taking cuttings from them, or simply from tubers.

However, researchers sometimes deliberately created graft chimera, but that’s not easy. Many known graft chimeras, such as Bizzarria Citrus, are very rare and accidental by-products of traditional grafts.

now, Jeroen Stuurman At Kigen, a Dutch crop technology company, he says he was the first to develop a reliable method of producing graft chimera. He won’t reveal any details about this method, but he says he used it to create many different graft chimeras from the types of potatoes, tomatoes and aubenin, and between sweet and chili peppers.

In the case of one graft thimella potato with a type of skin called pimpanell and another meaty skin called vintee, keygene is awarded the right of a plant breeder, that is, the right to horticultural, equivalent to copyright. This is the first time for a graft chimera. Getting these rights indicates that producing them is a potentially viable business, Suurman says. “For us, this was a signal that we could move on to the next step.”

The company is currently planning to create graft chimeras with properties such as resistance to pests and diseases. Pest resistance is often due to hair-like structures called trichomes on the surface of plants, which can secrete repellents or sticky substances to trap insects, Stuurman said. Trichomes are very difficult to move between plant varieties with traditional reproduction and genetic engineering, as many genes are involved, but his method effectively gives existing varieties “skin grafts.”

Potatoes are already grown from tubers rather than seeds, so if farmers choose, they could start growing such graft chimera tomorrow, Stuurman said. “There’s no need to change the way things grow.”

“It’s really interesting to be able to create a stable graft chimeras with commercially relevant properties.” Charles Menick At the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. “I don’t know that this has been done before, so their findings are really important.”

Graft chimeras tend to be unstable. So you can go back to one of the original forms, but the keygene must have overcome this to get the plant breeders right, says Colin Turn Bull Imperial College London. “The novelty appears to be the stability of “skin grafting,” and there are marketable types. ”