The latest edition of Frontier magazine features the breadfruit research of Susan Murch, Canada Research Chair in Natural Products Chemistry at UBC Okanagan. The story, Potato of the Pacific (p. 15), highlights the collaboration of Murch’s Plant Chemistry and Biotechnology Lab and the Centre for Species at Risk and Habitat Studies at UBC Okanagan, the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii, and Cultivaris, a commercial horticultural company.
Murch’s lab cultivated 7,500 breadfruit trees in its first four years, the report says. “Within a month of distributing the first batch, she was inundated with requests for over two million trees from organizations around the world.”
To meet the demand for propagated breadfruit, Murch’s lab and partners have formed a company called Global Breadfruit. Read more about it in Frontier, the quarterly publication of UBC’s Office of the Vice President, Academic and Research. It is available online as a PDF document: http://www.research.ubc.ca/Uploads/Docs/FrontierIssue7.pdf
