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| Monday, 13 December 2004 |
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Danes seeking to clone the perfect Christmas tree COPENHAGEN, Sunday (AFP) Danes are preparing to take the traditional holiday quest for the perfect fir to the next level as researchers here experiment with cloning to develop the mother of all Christmas trees. "It's an old dream to reproduce the perfect Christmas tree through cloning, and to thereby enable mass-production of 'elite' trees for the common good," said Jens Find, the chief researcher at Copenhagen's botanical laboratory that is working on the Christmas tree cloning project. The dream of pushing out multitudes of cookie-cutter perfect Christmas trees should become a "reality in 10 to 15 years", Find told AFP. Although Danish spruce growers are giants in the international luxury Christmas tree market, they face "huge losses because nearly half of the cultivated Christmas trees need to be thrown out since they are deformed and not fit for sale in Denmark or abroad," Kristensen said. It was their desire to eliminate this uncertainty factor and nail down a larger chunk of the international market that led the tree growers to turn to biotechnology and to place their hopes for the future in cloning. Researchers at Copenhagen's botanical laboratory have since the 1990s been working on a technique to artificially grow fir trees from shoots planted in an artificial, nutritious substance. Splitting tiny Nordmann fir tree shoots, measuring only 0.2 millimeters (1/64 of an inch), in two, the researchers freeze one half and cultivate the other, nurturing it first in a sterile incubator and then in a greenhouse. Every two weeks the laboratory sends some 2,000 shoots to horticulturist Mark Vart on the central Danish island of Fyn. "The plants remain in the greenhouses for at least one year before being planted out in the open," Find said. The process appears to be working, "and in about 10 years we could perhaps have the Christmas trees of our dreams," he added. |
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