Would you drink wine made from genetically engineered grapes if it had extra benefits?
Such wine could be on the menu, thanks to a grape variety six times richer than normal in resveratrol, the compound in
red wine associated with increased longevity, decreased heart disease and a host of other benefits.
According to New Scientist, Yuejin Wang and colleagues at the Northwest Agricultural and
Forestry
University in
Yangling,
Shaanxi province,
China, made the supervine by equipping it with an extra gene from a wild Chinese vine.
Vitus pseudoreticulata has an unusual variant of the stilbene synthase gene, which triggers resveratrol production.
The team plans to make wine from the GM vine, though their main goal is to make grapevines more resistant to fungus, which is kept in check by resveratrol.
For more info on reveratrol, consider the video below of the mouse with and without the substance:
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