Scientists clone Southern Africa’s wild fruit trees as forests disappear
Plant geneticist Alice Muchugi recalls meeting a group of furious fruit sellers on the side of a dusty road not far from Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, in 2024. They told her that a group of men armed with chainsaws had felled some of the district’s most prolific fruit trees, robbing the women of a steady source […]
In 2024, plant geneticist Alice Muchugi encountered a group of furious fruit sellers near Zimbabwe's capital, Harare. The sellers lamented the destruction of their district's most prolific fruit trees by armed men with chainsaws, who were after the trees' wood for kiln fuel. Muchugi identified the trees as wild loquats (Uapaca kirkiana), which had been cloned more than 20 years ago from superior mother trees in 25 locations across four countries within the region.
These cloned trees were growing at the Landscape Alliance's field gene bank in Domboshava, around 30 kilometers northeast of Harare. The wild loquat tree's sweet fruit is highly popular throughout Southern and East Africa. The women were granted permission to harvest the fruit for sale after Muchugi's team collected data on the trees.
The loggers' nighttime theft from the gene bank underscored the challenges faced by both fruit collectors and plant geneticists.
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