Peach palm (Bactris gasipaes) was domesticated as a fruit crop by the first Amazonians in traditional Neotropical agroforestry systems, but research and development (R&D) to date has not transformed its fruit into a modern success story. The fruit is really a tree ‘potato,’ competing with traditional starches rather than with succulent fruits. R&D efforts have focused more on production than on product transformation, commercialization and the consumer, thus failing to fill gaps in the production-to-consumption chain. Consumer demands are only now getting more consideration, and clear identification of the smallholder farmer as the R&D client is not yet generalized. Too many, often large germplasm collections have biased R&D programs away from smallholder farmers and did not pursue the quality and uniformity that consumers want. The general lessons learnt from 25 years of R&D efforts on peach palm that should guide the development of other indigenous agroforestry fruit tree species are: 1) identify market demands, whether subsistence or market-oriented; 2) identify clients and consumers, and their perceptions of the product; 3) work on food and nutritional security aspects of the species and let entrepreneurs be attracted, rather than vice versa; 4) take up species improvement in a moderately sized effort, using a participatory approach tightly focused on clients’ demands; and 5) reappraise the priorities from time to time.
Tag: fruit crops
Peach palm: bequeathing a legacy of genetic wealth to resource-poor farmers
Abstract not found
African plum: family – Burseraceae. Safou – Shoue-Assa-Abua-Atanga
Evergreen oleiferous tropical fruit tre that can reach 20-30m in height in forest and 12m in orchads/plantations;the trank has an everage diameter of 55cm;leaves are compound,imparipinnate,with 5-8 pairs of leaflets; flowers are small with axis inflorescence.The fruit is usually cylindrical in shape.The ripe fruit is bluish/black in colour and filled with a rich oily pulp containing one seed.The seed is large and has no seed coat.
Draft Genomes of Two Artocarpus Plants, Jackfruit (A. heterophyllus) and Breadfruit (A. altilis)
Two of the most economically important plants in the Artocarpus genus are jackfruit (A. heterophyllus Lam.) and breadfruit (A. altilis (Parkinson) Fosberg). Both species are long-lived trees that have been cultivated for thousands of years in their native regions. Today they are grown throughout tropical to subtropical areas as an important source of starch and other valuable nutrients. There are hundreds of breadfruit varieties that are native to Oceania, of which the most commonly distributed types are seedless triploids. Jackfruit is likely native to the Western Ghats of India and produces one of the largest tree-borne fruit structures (reaching up to 45 kg). To-date, there is limited genomic information for these two economically important species. Here, we generated 273 Gb and 227 Gb of raw data from jackfruit and breadfruit, respectively. The high-quality reads from jackfruit were assembled into 162,440 scaffolds totaling 982 Mb with 35,858 genes. Similarly, the breadfruit reads were assembled into 180,971 scaffolds totaling 833 Mb with 34,010 genes. A total of 2822 and 2034 expanded gene families were found in jackfruit and breadfruit, respectively, enriched in pathways including starch and sucrose metabolism, photosynthesis, and others. The copy number of several starch synthesis-related genes were found to be increased in jackfruit and breadfruit compared to closely-related species, and the tissue-specific expression might imply their sugar-rich and starch-rich characteristics. Overall, the publication of high-quality genomes for jackfruit and breadfruit provides information about their specific composition and the underlying genes involved in sugar and starch metabolism.