After the meeting, Gary Mader of Claussen raised the idea with the company’s marketing agents and concluded that it might be time to resurrect the old collaboration with Simon’s lab. “This is something to revisit,” Mader says. “It’s a different era. People are more conscious about eating healthy foods.”

But in plant breeding, it’s not always possible to pick up where you left off. “When you say no to a breeding effort and you don’t move ahead with it, the seeds die,” explains Staub. “You have to start all over again.” And that is what the UW team has done.

Reviving the seeds became a project for Hugo Cuevas, who arrived at UW-Madison from the University of Puerto Rico. Cuevas discovered that some of the decade-old seeds still produced plants, but they no longer generated the orange-fleshed immature cucumbers that the researchers desired. A few of the cucumbers did turn orange later in maturity, a good sign that the color trait wasn’t lost entirely. But Cuevas has had to go back to cross-breeding, essentially recreating Navazio’s work, to restore the desired characteristics.

Cuevas is optimistic that he will locate the genes responsible for making beta carotene in the hybrid cucumbers before he graduates, which would greatly speed future breeding efforts. In that sense, the eight-year hiatus has actually helped the project, as lab techniques for locating such genetic markers are far more advanced these days.

This time, the project looks to avoid a dead end. Simon and Staub have already lined up a graduate student to take over where Cuevas leaves off. The beta carotene trait should be fixed sometime within the next two years, says Simon, and then it’s just a matter of connecting with the right “renegade thinker” in the seed, food processing or restaurant industry. He imagines a restaurant chain spicing up a salad bar with orange cucumbers alongside purple lettuce and red carrots or a seed catalog selling packets to home gardeners. There is also still the possibility that Claussen or some other brand will pick up the idea and start making orange pickles for grocery-store shelves.

In the meantime, the old school breeding program continues. From four-foot-tall cucumber plants supported by poles and string, Cuevas plucks golden male flowers from one plant and then transfers their pollen to nearby female blooms. To ensure the genes from two flowers mix, he uses a twist-tie to bind them together, one enveloping the other. The process must be repeated again and again, making for a summer’s worth of long, tedious days under the hot light of the greenhouse.

But from this laborious winnowing of genes may come those magic seeds, which yield fruit capable of fighting cancer, heart disease and perhaps even obesity. And this time, there are good signs that those seeds are being planted in fertile ground.

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Tags: Food crops, Horticulture
Posted in Agriculture, Fall 2007, Featured, Food | No Comments »