Wild apple trees of Central Asia will help restore world fruit production
Researchers warn that apples lose their genetic integrity. According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), large-scale hybridization has had such a huge impact that commercial crops have weak genetic immunity to common among apple tree diseases.
"Only the infusion of genetic material from wild ancestral apples can save domestic supplies," concludes the USDA.
All modern apples were cultivated from ancestral wild apples that once flourished in Central Asia - on the territory of Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, the British information portal www.Simcoe.com.
According to scientists, there were four main genotypes. "All four are in danger of extinction," said Adrian Newton, a British environmentalist. According to him, one of these species - Malus sieversii (apple tree of Sivers) - is the key ancestor of all apples cultivated throughout the world. Newton believes that several thousand years of breeding narrowed the initial genetic diversity of apple trees to 10 varieties, which account for 70 percent of the world production of apples.
According to the Royal Horticultural Society, 7,500 varieties were bred from the Sivers apple tree population.
Scientific evidence proves that wild apple trees were first domesticated about 4000 years ago in Central Asia. According to Riccardo Valesco of the Edmund Mach Foundation, ancestral apples had about 57,000 genotypes.
In the 1990s, about 130,000 seeds of Sivers' wild apple were collected in Asia. They produced 1,300 seedlings at a research station of the US Department of Agriculture. "The goal is to preserve a variety of apples," the USDA says.
