In cloned palm oil trees, a genetic mutation makes the difference between healthy fruit (top) and worthless fruit (bottom). A new genetic test helps farmers identify dud trees.
You probably touched something made from palm oil 10 times before you even got to work this morning.
Shampoo, toothpaste, cosmetics, soaps, pastries, the cream in your coffee, the butter substitute on your toast—they likely all contain the low-cost, low-cholesterol oil made from the fruit of oil palm trees.
Growing demand for palm oil, which already makes up 45 percent of the world’s edible oils, puts growers at a difficult crossroads. They can expand their palm oil fields—which often leads to devastating deforestation in the tree’s native tropical habitat—or plant cloned trees—which produce about 20 percent more fruit than trees grown from seeds.
But cloned trees come with their own risk: Since the technology was introduced 30 years ago, cloning palm oils can cause a genetic mutation that leaves fruit on an unpredictable number of trees disfigured and useless. And to make things even harder for palm oil farmers, there’s no way to predict which clones will be high-yielding and which will be worthless.
Until now.
St. Louis biotech firm Orion Genomics is one of the researchers behind a simple, new genetic test that can weed out the duds among cloned palm oil trees. According to the study published in Nature (and released online last week,) the test identifies which plants have “good karma” (or a healthy biomarker on the aptly named karma retrotransposon) and which have “bad karma” (or a mutation).
via Orion Genomics
Nate Lakey, CEO of Orion Genomics.
“We can take a piece of leaf and predict with perfect accuracy which trees are elite and which trees are doomed,” says Orion Genomics CEO Nate Lakey. “It’s a wonderful story, how technology can help solve or meet the demand for more food to help feed the world’s growing population; we don’t have to resort to the destruction of priceless, fragile, natural land.”
Without the test, farmers who grow cloned trees wouldn’t know a tree has “bad karma” until it grew tall enough to start bearing fruit, which takes about six years. Even if a farmer only finds a handful of mutated trees after that time, the surrounding orchard is too tall to grow replacements.
“It’s a career decision for a grower,” Lakey says. “The tree has a 30-year lifespan. [The grower] is going to plant trees that will last his entire working lifetime. If you make a mistake and everything is a loss, it’s just a very big risk.”
Orion Genomics, headquartered in the CIC@CET building in St. Louis’ innovation district, developed the test with help from the Malaysian Palm Oil Board, which oversees the country’s palm oil industry, and plant geneticists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. When they’re not researching palm oil trees, Orion Genomics’ epigenetic researchers focus on personalized medicine, such as a blood-based test to identify patients with elevated risk for colorectal cancer.
Lakey, a Washington University alum, co-founded Orion Genomics in 1998. He chose to return to St. Louis to locate the company’s genetics research near the The McDonnell Genome Institute. “We wanted to be in a region that is known worldwide for agriculture,” Lakey says.
If St. Louis wasn’t known worldwide before, it is now. Orion Genomics collaborated with palm oil experts in Malaysia, which is responsible for about 40 percent of palm oil production worldwide.
“It’s kind of funny: Some people jokingly refer to St. Louis as a flyover city, but in fact we have world-renowned growers and plant researchers who fly over L.A., who fly over Chicago, who fly over Dallas to fly to St. Louis and visit us for several weeks,” Lakey says. “We’re a fly-to city. Breakthroughs will happen if you partner with St. Louis companies.
“You’ll solve problems that have beleaguered industries for 30 years.”
Contact Lindsay Toler by an email at LToler@stlmag.com or on Twitter @StLouisLindsay. For more from St. Louis Magazine, subscribe or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
