The world of biotechnology has provided the floral industry with impressive genetic engineering and breeding in recent years. However, vase life has always been a hard nut to crack. Most of the time, the approach to elongating vase life resorts to flower food/solutions rather than breeding the flower differently. Although modifying flower color and breeding flowers to create new varieties has been the forefront there are other issues comin to the forefront of biotechnology.
According to Floral Management Magazine, North Carolina State University is working on increasing the post-harvest vase life of cut flowers. Not only can this research provide more robust flower solutions but also flowers that require lower levels of maintenance. So far, it is believed that “manntiol dehydrogenase enzyme over-expression might be used to engineer a broad variety of plants for resistance to mannitol-secreting fungal pathaogens like Botrytis.”
Basically with some help from science it is possible for a wide variety of flowers to be breed to actually be immune to fungus and the process of fungal disintegration.
Let’s keep an eye on this story together as the research gets published. You can find more on this story in the November issue of Floral Management Magazine. You can also see the official press release.
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