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Fruits of science

Fruits of science fed up with bananas turning over-ripe? Just wait for a couple of years and you just might have a solution. A group of scientists at the National Botanical Research Institute ( nbri ) in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, are close to developing a transgenic banana plant that would bear fruits the ripening of which could be delayed. If the nbri scientists are able to successfully prepare the transgenic variety of banana on the basis of work done so far, it might lead to a revolution in the horticulture industry.

How is that possible? Well, the delayed fruit-ripening technology has already made headway in countries like usa , where research is underway on several plants. What the team led by Parvendra Nath, head of the department of plant molecular biology at nbri , has achieved is a major breakthrough in India. They have identified a gene that leads to ripening, and then gone on to prepare an

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