Coming soon: Extra-healthy apples!

The breakthrough is already being used to breed

red-fleshed apples with more anti-oxidants,which are credited

with health benefits from keeping joints healthy to warding

off Alzheimer’s disease.

“Now we have the sequence of the apple genome,we will be able to identify the genes which control the characteristic that our sensory scientists have identified as most desired by

consumers — crispiness,juiciness and flavour,”lead scientist

Roger Hellens of New Zealand firm Plant & Food Research said.

Although breeders try to cross the only the best plants,the slow growth of the apple tree means they don’t know if have been successful until up to eight years later.

Now breeders will be able to screen seedlings for key genes,vastly speeding up the process. Traits that hamper production can also be more easily bred out,according to the findings published in the ‘Nature Genetics’ journal.

The company has already pinpointed some of the genes that control the colour of an apple’s flesh and its flavour and is using the data to make apples with higher than normal levels of health-boosting anti-oxidants.

A sweeter version is under development and could be on sale by 2015. Other plans include boosting the amounts of an appetite-suppressing compound already present in apples.

The decoding of the apple’s DNA by a team of almost 100 scientists from five different countries has also shed new light on its roots.

The research suggests that around 65 million years ago,the time when a comet is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs,the plant that would eventually give rise to the apple tree underwent a massive and rapid genetic change,in which many of its genes were duplicated.

Experts have welcomed the research.

Amit Dhingra of Washington State University said: “Before genome sequencing,the best we could do was correlate traits with genes. Now we can point to a specific gene and say,’This is the one;this gene is responsible for the trait’.

“The trait of interest might be,for instance a disease,which is why sequencing the human genome was such an important milestone. Or the trait might be for something desirable,like flavour in a piece of fruit.”