Save Genes for the Future

It is delicious, it is ancient, it is popular, and it plays an important part in human culture. It is apple, a kind of fruit included in our food list long since the Stone Age. 

Modern cultivars of domesticated apple (Malus pumila) were first brought to the world from Europe, and were therefore believed to be originated from Europe. However, scientists found through years of investigation that cultivated apples around the world may trace back to one ancestor—the Malus sieversii. 

Malus sieversii is a wild apple native to the mountains of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Xinjiang, China. It was first described (as Pyrus sieversii) in 1833 by Carl Friedrich von Ledebour, a German naturalist who saw them growing in the Altai Mountains. 

Located in the far interior of the Eurasia continent, the Tianshan Mountains preserved many of the Mesozoic warmth-requiring wild fruits, when the Quaternary glaciation of the Cenozoic came about two to three million years ago. 

Recent survey reveals that the wild fruit forest in the Tianshan Mountains owns 58 wild fruit species, and Malus sieversii is the major species, with as many as 84 varieties. This is a natural gene pool rarely seen in the world and may provide future possibilities for the development of apple species. 

However, the species is now considered vulnerable to extinction due to human activities. Wild fruit forest now covers only about half of its areas 50 years ago. Plant diseases and insect pests caused blockbuster damage to the forest. Death rate of the forest reached 80 per cent in Xinjiang’s Xinyuan County, core area of the wild fruit forest. Statistics indicate that the damage is spreading at a speed of 400 hectares per year. 

Scientist from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography proposed an initiative to preserve the gene pool for wild fruits in the Tianshan Mountains in 2014. The initiative was highlighted by the Chinese government. The project to save and preserve the wild fruit forest was approved this April and will be launched in early October. 

The remaining wild fruit forest of about 5,000 hectares will get systematic conservation and research under the frame of the project. Scientists hope to find the reasons for the ecosystem degradation of the wild fruit forest and therefore develop key technologies for species rejuvenation of the forest ecosystem. 

Modern thremmatoloy develops more and more refined breeding technologies, but leaves less and less farming varieties. About 75 per cent of farming species have gone extinct around the world. This will mean less and less possibilities for variety development, in the perspective of gene basis. 

The wild fruit forest, with its abundant germplasm resources, may hold the last key for future development of fruit. But can that happen? Maybe, the answer lies in the wild fruit forest preservation project.