Unwrapping the Genetic Secrets of a Chocolate Bar
18 October 2010
Scientists have mapped the genetic code of two kinds of cacao or cocoa tree, which provide the beans used to make chocolate
This is the VOA Special English Agriculture Report.
Cacao or cocoa trees grow in hot, rainy areas of Africa, Asia and Central and South America. Their beans are used to make cocoa powder, cocoa butter and of course chocolate.
There are five to six million growers, maybe more. Many are poor family farmers with only a few hectares.
West Africa produces more than half of all cocoa beans. Ivory Coast leads the world in production, followed by its neighbor Ghana.
The trees are usually in their fifth year when they start to grow the pods that contain the beans. The trees produce the most pods when they are ten, but they are still productive long after that.
Workers use large knives to cut the lower pods and long tools to remove pods from high on the tree. Later they break open the pods to remove the beans.
A half-gram of chocolate requires about four hundred beans. The World Cocoa Foundation says an average pod contains twenty to fifty beans. And experts say growers can lose perhaps one-third of their harvest to diseases and insects.
But now scientists have genetic maps of two kinds of cocoa trees. These genomes are mostly complete and could lead scientists to new ways to increase production and prevent disease.
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