Tutti frutti for Kiwis

NZ biotech Genesis Research and Development (NZSX/ASX: GEN) and fruit science company HortResearch have published details of 130,000 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) for kiwifruit.

The data is the world's most extensive collection of kiwifruit DNA sequences and is published today in the journal BMC Genomics.

The ESTs - short DNA sequences that can be used to identify gene expression - will be used to speed up development of new kiwifruit varieties based on desirable fruit traits.

The most common cultivars are the green-fleshed Hayward and a yellow-fleshed variety called Hort16A, developed by HortResearch and marketed by Zespri.

HortResearch and Genesis released a similar number of apple ESTs two years ago, part of HortResearch's apple and pear breeding program.

Genesis has a large agbiotech patent portfolio and is also developing human health therapeutics, some based on RNAi.