Korean pine is a tree with character. To get the first harvest of tasty and healthy nuts from it, people have to wait for decades. This creates enormous difficulties for everyone who grows pine for nuts and valuable oil, as ordinary care and classical breeding take too much time.
Scientists from China have found a way to «bypass» this natural slowness. They took samples from a hundred trees from different parts of the country and studied their DNA. The main task was to find special genetic markers – a kind of «quality signs» in the pine genome that are responsible for how generous the tree will be.
Researchers were interested in very specific things:
What will the tree's yield be and how many cones will grow on it;
How large and heavy the nuts will be;
How many «empty shells» – nuts without kernels inside – there will be.
By correlating the genome with these real characteristics, biologists have created special DNA tests. Now, there is no need to wait 30–40 years for a sapling to grow and give its first harvest to find out if it is fertile. It is enough to check a small sprout in the laboratory, and the test will immediately show whether it is worth spending time and space on the plantation on it.
In addition, scientists found another pleasant fact: all the studied pines are genetically very rich and similar to each other. This means that by selecting only the most fruitful trees, we do not risk weakening the breed. The pine will retain its natural wild hardiness to frost and diseases.
Thanks to genetics, growing pine nuts is turning from a lifelong lottery into an understandable and predictable process. New groves will grow faster and yield more, and scientists will no longer have to wait half a century to see the results of their work.
