Vegetable breeding steps up to the next level: New work with some favourite food crops

摘要

For almost 70 years, scientists at the U.S. Vegetable Laboratory (USVL) in Charleston, S.C., have changed the way many popular vegetables are bred and used. Recent examples of this include research by USVL geneticists Mark Farnham and Richard Fery. Farnham and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, have found that concentrations of gluco-raphanin - a compound associated with the vegetable's cancer-inhibiting abilities - in broccoli (Brassica oleracea) are influenced more by genetics than by environment.