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Danton H. Pascual

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A strong contrast to a yellow-fleshed natural pineapple, the market will soon see a genetically modified fruit pink-fleshed Rose Pineapple which might look like the one above.. Image © Hiroshi Higuchi / Getty Images

Do you love fruit salads? Are you fond of experimenting by adding colors on the mix to make it more fancy and attractive?

Now that wait is almost over.

Very soon, the food stalls and supermarkets in the US of A will get a fill of pineapple, not the yellow fleshed ones, but a new breed of pink-fleshed pineapples. You read it right, pink pineapples! Who knows, soon it will also be in the Philippines.

This is how the development progresses. Sometime in 2005, world’s pineapple mass producer Del Monte, started working on the development of pink-fleshed pineapple variety, more specifically a Del Monte Rose pineapple in a shade of pink.

The genetically modified (GMO) pineapple is being grown in Costa Rica (South America) by Del Monte Fresh Produce Co. Inc., a subsidiary of the US company based in Coral Gables, Florida.

According to the US Food and Drug Administration, Del Monte disclosed it was able to successfully push through with genetically engineering a yellow pineapple to produce much lower levels of its existing enzymes that “convert the pink pigment lycopene to the yellow pigment beta carotene.” Also put simply, altering the expression of genes involved in lycopene biosynthesis. Lycopene is the pigment that makes tomatoes red and watermelons pink.

Del Monte plans to market the GMO rose pineapple as “extra sweet pink flesh pineapple” to make a strong contrast to its existing Del Monte Gold yellow pineapple which are “extra sweet pineapple.”

So why Del Monte do not want to produce the new breed of pineapple inside the US mainland? We can only speculate on the answer ourselves.

In the Philippines, Del Monte has a vast pineapple plantation in the town of Manolo Fortich of Bukidnon province.

You might be interested on this:

And video below is a commentary reaction on GMO fruits:

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First Published         13 Feb , 2017      5:24 am      (UTC/GMT -8 HRS)       with 394 views.

THIS ARTICLE IS RELATED TO    genetically modified crops, genetically modified organism, GMO, GMO Pineapple