Agricultural Science

Within OSF, agricultural sciences include all areas of research and development relevant to bringing a new tree fruit variety to market.  This includes: tree fruit genomics, bioinfomatics, molecular biology, precision breeding, plant tissue culture and transformation, macropropagation, greenhouse and field horticulture, tree and fruit physiology, plant and fruit nutrition, post harvest assessments and specialized biochemical and toxicological testing.

Agricultural biotechnology is a vast area of science where a firm must specialize and remain very focused in order to marry excellence in genomics, genetics and breeding with field level assessments, regulatory approval matters and commercialization.  The field is technically complicated and filled with specialized terms and definitions (see Biotechnology Definitions). 

Modern agricultural biotechnology and the use of recombination DNA technologies to genetically engineer plants was developed in the 1980’s.  Major advancements in plant genomics, and tree fruit genomics in particular, have allowed OSF to create a unique business for precision breeding and development of new tree fruit varieties. These techniques focus on using the genes already existing within the plants to manipulate plant traits and behaviour. 

For centuries, conventional plant breeders have crossbred existing tree fruit varieties to produce new varieties with certain desired traits. This approach often takes decades of intensive work to develop a new variety but it has resulted in many of North America’s favourite tree fruit varieties. Today, science has provided plant breeders with a new set of tools that simply allow for more precision in their continued search for better tree fruit varieties.

In scientific terms, this approach is best described as precision breeding or gene therapy whereby plant breeders have developed molecular techniques to silence or over-express genes within the plant. This is done without using foreign marker genes or introducing foreign plant proteins.

In non-scientific terms - if the genetic composition of an apple were compared to a railroad track stretching across North America - the silencing of a gene is the equivalent of simply removing one railway crossing and replacing it with another piece of the same track. 

Once development is completed, the new variety must gain regulatory approval based on an environmental safety assessment; as well as a food and feed safety assessment.  This requires fruit trees to be grown in contained field trials for a number of years and for the trees to be phenotypically stable and well characterized; the fruit must be of high quality, safe and nutritionally equivalent  (or better) than existing products.  OSF’s commercial varieties will be the most tested, assessed and safest tree fruits ever released.