Genetically Modified Fruit

Conventional breeding of fruit has occurred for the past 1000 or more years.  Mutation breeding using chemical or radiation agents to mutate fruit DNA has been used since the late 1920's.  Genetically modified fruits have been bred, produced and consumed for more than 10 years. 

Several genetically-modified fruit varieties have already been successfully commercialized, including disease resistant papaya.  Work also continues in melons, strawberries, Kiwi, pineapple, mango, banana and other fruits. Now, Okanagan Specialty Fruits is using agricultural biotechnology and genetic engineering tools to create new plant varieties.

Our corporate focus is to work with plant traits not possible or extremely difficult to introduce through conventional breeding.  Recent outputs from tree fruit genomics programs now offer us candidate genes which make this type of molecular breeding possible.  We plan to do this using a precision breeding approach, and only using plant DNA. This results in a novel genetically-modified fruit that is not transgenic.