At the end of our long day we stopped at the R&D department of HaZera, connected to Limagrain, the second largest seed company in the world. There we met with Hanne and Yossi who informed us that the company's mission is to be a leading hybrid vegetable seed company. Hanne gave us an overview of the company and described to us the role ICT plays in the company. This role includes storing information, DNA sequencing, tag profiling, being able to check whether a trait is inherited or from the environment, and more.
We learned about the breeding of tomatoes on the vine, and seedless watermelons, and more. Much of this is achieved by DNA markers that permit marker assisted selection. Most of us probably didn't understand just what all this means, but it was certainly interesting to learn that the successful selection of plants via nucleotype composition is the result of many thousands of experiments. It sort of makes you think that maybe education, with considerably less focused experimentation, is still (and perhaps happily) far from being a true science. But of course we knew all along that it's really an art.
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