[:is]On this occasion, we bring you this interesting article on citrus recently published in general media, and in many other specialized ones, as we believe you will find it interesting. At IDEAGRO, we work a lot with citrus, as it is one of the most common crops in southern Spain.
If you have an orange or other citrus on hand, take a look at it. Behind this fruit there is an epic story, in which the battles of Alexander the Great, the expansion of Islam, the military campaigns of the Christian crusaders, the Jewish diaspora and the discovery of America resonate. That fruit you are looking at is a book on the history of humanity and it has come into your hands thanks to a multitude of conquests and reconquests and a centuries-long scientific battle.
“The ancestor of all citrus lived about eight million years ago in Southeast Asia”explains the biologist Manuel Talon, which has just traced "the most powerful family tree" of these fruit trees. Their marriages, simplified, can be drawn as if they were those of the Buendía family in one hundred years of solitude. “The sweet orange is the daughter of a pummelo [the mother of grapefruit] and a mandarin”, relates Talón, who places this link in what is now western China some 3,000 years ago.
In this cross, the tangerine was the father. It was a wild tangerine, sour and full of seeds, inedible, that would send its sperm, the male pollen, through the wind to the mother flowers, a pummelo. Fruit of the union would be born the first orange, which according to Talón speculates would be detected by a clever Chinese farmer, who would perpetuate its cultivation through grafting. millennia later, At the end of the 15th century, the sweet orange arrived in Spain in the hands of Portuguese and Italian merchants.
The biologist's team has studied the genome of 30 citrus species. Specifically, scientists have read the DNA of chloroplasts, organelles present in plant cells that carry genetic information inherited from the mother. Their results are now published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
The mandarin arrived in Spain in 1845 thanks to the Count of Ripalda, from the Marichalar family, but again Talon places its origins in Southeast Asia, thousands of years ago. "The mandarin is the daughter of a sweet orange father and a wild mandarin mother," continues the biologist. The lemon, for its part, is the offspring of a bitter orange mother and a citron father, a fruit with a thick and aromatic rind used in medieval medicine.
Spain is the 5th largest citrus product in the world, 1st in the European Union and one of the main exporters worldwide according to FAO data. Worldwide, citrus trees occupy six million hectares in almost 100 countries. But they are fragile crops, as he stresses Joaquin Dopazo, Head of Bioinformatics and Genomics at the Príncipe Felipe Research Center, in Valencia. In 1862, a pseudo fungus landed in Spanish orange groves. The disease it caused, gummosis, destroyed the crops, except for bitter orange trees, which from then on were used to graft sweet oranges and other citrus fruits onto their trunk. In the late 1960s, history repeated itself. The so-called sadness virus killed 50 million bitter orange trees in Spain and we had to change rootstocks. "Studying the genomes of citrus fruits allows us to see which species are more resistant to adverse conditions and why, in order to obtain better adapted varieties," summarizes Dopazo, co-author of the family tree.
At IDEAGRO, we work a lot with a crop like citrus (in all its variants; oranges and tangerines, but also lemons and grapefruit…)Given our scope of action, we regularly work throughout the Mediterranean arc, from Huelva to Catalonia.
During the last years, we have been developing numerous essays and works together with the farmers of the Mediterranean arc (including our good friend and great citrus grower in Spain Ricardo Aguayo, also know as @CriandoNaranjos), testing the effectiveness of nitrogen-fixing and phosphorus-solubilizing bacteria; seeking to improve productivity, maturation and BRIX graduation, as well as improve the general health of the crops and their root system, promoting excellent quality crops and guaranteeing the best final product for the industry and/or the final consumer.
In all our tests and developments together with the producers with whom we work, we use market leading products, but we also use our own strains of beneficial bacteria for agriculture, which we develop in our facilities located in Lorquí, Murcia.
If you want more information, please contact our Technical Director, Pedro Palazón by email, palazon[at]ideagro.es, or by phone at 968 118 086. Do not hesitate to ask us about it! At IDEAGRO, we have a multidisciplinary team at your entire disposal.[:]
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