Re: apples on a stick

From: Rick McCallister
Message: 50922
Date: 2007-12-16

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the apple. The
article goes on to say that apples do have to be
grafted and that the seeds do not breed true.
Alma is Turkish, right? And it does look like a nice
bridge between <apple> and <malum> --although we're
dealing with about 6,000 or more years of achronicity.
If only we could find an apple crate from 4,000 BC or
so.

"The wild ancestor of Malus domestica is Malus
sieversii. It has no common name in English, but is
known in Kazakhstan, where it is native, as 'alma'; in
fact, the region where it is thought to originate is
called Alma-Ata, or 'father of the apples'. This tree
is still found wild in the mountains of Central Asia
in southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and
Xinjiang, China.
For many years, there was a debate about whether M.
domestica evolved from chance hybridisation among
various wild species. Recent DNA analysis by Barrie
Juniper, Emeritus Fellow in the Department of Plant
Sciences at Oxford University and others, has
indicated, however, that the hybridisation theory is
probably false. Instead, it appears that a single
species still growing in the Ili Valley on the
northern slopes of the Tien Shan mountains at the
border of northwest China and the former Soviet
Republic of Kazakhstan is the progenitor of the apples
we eat today. Leaves taken from trees in this area
were analyzed for DNA composition, which showed them
all to belong to the species M. sieversii, with some
genetic sequences common to M. domestica.[citation
needed]
Some individual M. sieversii, recently planted by the
US government at a research facility, resist many
diseases and pests that affect domestic apples, and
are the subject of continuing research to develop new
disease-resistant apples.
Other species that were previously thought to have
made contributions to the genome of the domestic
apples are Malus baccata and Malus sylvestris, but
there is no hard evidence for this in older apple
cultivars. These and other Malus species have been
used in some recent breeding programmes to develop
apples suitable for growing in climates unsuitable for
M. domestica, mainly for increased cold tolerance.
The apple tree was perhaps the earliest tree to be
cultivated, and apples have remained an important food
in all cooler climates. To a greater degree than other
tree fruit, except possibly citrus, apples store for
months while still retaining much of their nutritive
value. Winter apples, picked in late autumn and stored
just above freezing, have been an important food in
Asia and Europe for millennia, as well as in Argentina
and in the United States since the arrival of Europeans.["


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