Flash in the Pan

When you're a big chocolate company like Mars, you think about cocoa, without which you cannot make a thing. You think about diseases and changing climate and other factors that could cut production and raise your costs - and the 6.5 million or so cocoa growers in the world, most of which work on small family farms, have as much attention on a "luxury." According to the New York Times, Mars is working with IBM to map the cocoa genome - not to create genetically modified plans (at least supposedly), but to be smarter and more efficient in how cross-breeding and plant development in the greenhouse work:

Computational biologists and supercomputers can drastically accelerate the pace at which promising new strains of cocoa trees come out of the greenhouse, from the traditional length of five to seven years down to 18 months or so, Dr. Shapiro said.

That is a huge time and money savings. It's easy to forget that it takes significant time to grow a tree, and that to avoid GM methods, you have to bring plants to maturity and work through a line of generations to get the eventual results that you want. If mapping the genome helps them move through the process more effectively, it takes some of the pressure off switching to more artificial and potentially risky approaches, like swapping genes around.

Labels: chocolate, genome, GM, science