The Potential of Biotechnology in the Avocado Industry

The artificial modification of plants and animals to improve their species is a simple definition of "biotechnology." Under this definition, the idea has been present in the past. An example would be the fermentation method used in Babylonia to preserve food and drink around 6,000 B.C. But as a scientific term, for laboratory research purposes, biotechnology wasn’t used until the 19th century.

One of the forefathers of the discipline was the microbiologist Louis Pasteur, who studied fermentation, created the pasteurization technique (a method to destroy microorganisms in food) and generated penicillin from biotechnological procedures. Currently, the science of biotechnology is supported by others for its applications, such as genetics, chemistry, biology, embryology and more recently, robotics and information technology. Together, they benefit other sectors, such as agriculture, health, food, and packaged consumer goods.

ProMexico's Business Intelligence Unit defined biotechnology as "a discipline that combines various techniques, methods, and processes that, using biological systems, living organisms, or their derivatives, develops technologies, processes, products, and services that allow solving different types of human needs." Recently, this matter has become very important due to its different applications.

In fact, the global biotechnology market's worth is expected to be around $833.34 billion by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 7% from 2020, according to information from Fior Markets. For that year, according to data from IBISWorld, a total of 11,343 companies already belonged to that segment.

One of the industries in which biotechnology has an application is agri-food. Among the objectives pursued in this sector is the improvement of plants to increase their yield and shelf life. It is also used to create transgenic crops, which introduce new traits in fruits, such as more resistance to pests and certain diseases, and thus make them of higher quality.

These last features are what make the Mexican avocado an export product, which is achieved by careful cultivation, harvesting and packaging methods followed by the more than 34,000 producers and 84 packing companies of the fruit that are part of the Association of Avocado Producers and Packers-Exporters of Mexico (APEAM) because they adhere to strict safety standards.

Given this scenario, biotechnology represents great potential for the avocado industry, one of the most productive and successful in the world (whose export value grew 24% between 2018 and 2021, according to Statista). It can help improve species, make an early diagnosis of plant diseases and detect pests in crops, among other things.

The forestry field, to which the avocado also belongs, is another to which biotechnology can contribute. Trees are fundamental species of ecosystems, so this discipline can help to  better classify them using tools like DNA-based molecular markers, joined with biochemistry and genomics, which help to generate knowledge about which areas have regenerated naturally, for example, or to discover the relationship between the plants in these areas and the microbial communities with which they interact. This can help with protection. This is the case of the avocado tree, which can be the object of such studies, as it is cultivated in wooded areas of Mexico.

But there are more powerful reasons to apply biotechnology in the agri-food industry. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), this science is applied incrementally to alleviate hunger and poverty, contribute to the adaptation of crops to climate change and maintain the natural resource base.

Thanks to biotechnology, biofertilizers are manufactured to improve the nutritional condition of crops or as a substitute for chemical supplements. Other biotechnological methods and tools that are increasingly used in developing countries include plant tissue culture techniques, such as micropropagation (tissue culture to multiply plants asexually), mutagenesis (production of mutations from DNA), interspecific or intergeneric hybridization (crosses between species of the same genus or of different genera), genetic modification and molecular marker-assisted selection.

Other biotechnologies that are also used in these same regions to conserve resources for food are cryopreservation (embryo freezing), the production of artificial seeds, somatic embryogenesis (generation of an embryo from a cell, without the fusion of gametes) and other forms of cell or tissue culture in vitro.

An example of the application of biotechnology in avocado in its research phase is being carried out this year at the University of Antioquia, Colombia, together with the Corporation for Biological Research of that country. Aura Urrea Trujillo, a Ph.D. in Agricultural Sciences at the university’s Institute of Biology of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, studies methods of selection and cloning of the plant to improve its tolerance to the pest Phytophthora cinnamomi, which causes the roots to rot.

In Mexico, Ph.D. in Plant Physiology Alejandro  Barrientos Priego seeks to develop new avocado species at the Chapingo Autonomous University through clonal propagation and has worked on obtaining rootstocks (plants with grafts) that dwarf the fruit so that they acquire tolerance to droughts and are resistant to the tristeza disease (the same one caused by the Phytophthora cinnamomi fungus) that affects the avocado tree in our country.

FAO recognizes that when biotechnology is used in conjunction and appropriately with other technological tools to produce food, agricultural products and services, it makes an important contribution to meeting the needs of a population that is rapidly expanding and increasingly urbanized.

According to the same vision of the FAO, research and development of agriculture biotechnologies must put more focus on small farmers, producers and even consumers' needs because until now they haven’t obtained enough benefits from them.

The use of biotechnology should help achieve sustainable food production for more  than 2 billion people by 2050. The Mexican avocado industry is willing to work to achieve this goal by providing high-quality nutritious fruit to the world.