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We've finally solved the biggest problem with apples

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Flickr/Steven Depolo

It's a fact of life: A sliced or bitten apple will turn brown if left uncovered. While a little spritz of lemon juice might save its color, who wants lemon-flavored apple slices?

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Browned or bruised apples aren't just a cosmetic problem. They result in millions of pieces of perfectly good fruit being thrown away each year, since humans like their apples shiny and crunchy.

But one company says they can fix this with a genetically modified apple they've dubbed the "Arctic Golden Delicious."

Why apples brown

When you cut into an apple, you also cut some of its cells in half. This releases a chemical called a polyphenol oxidase, an enzyme that pulls oxygen from the air and uses it to create compounds called o-quinones, which then link up into long chains (which may include proteins, too) that turn the apple's flesh brown.

Lemon juice stops browning because it is acidic and contains antioxidants — two things that slow down the enzymes involved.

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This same process is at work in many of the plants we eat, and, according to Scientific American, and is even partly responsible for the delicious taste and brown color of coffee beans and chocolate.

Browning probably evolved because it softens the flesh of the apple, which makes the seeds more likely to fall out after the fruit's been nibbled on, according to BuzzFeed.

Why it's a problem

brown eaten apple core
Quinn Dombrowski/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

People can be very picky about their apples, so millions of pounds don't make it to store shelves every year because they are browned in spots or bruised (also a factor of the browning effect described above).

"A lot of apples aren't packed because maybe they don't have the right shape or right color, but they're a perfectly good eating apple," Dave Henze of Holtzinger Fruit Company told BuzzFeed. While some bruised apples can be used in juice or in pre-packaged apple slices, "there's a huge amount of food that is thrown away or not used."

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This ads up to about half of produce grown and billions of dollars' worth of lost fruits and vegetables, according to a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report and a study in the Journal of Consumer Affairs.

While a non-browning apple won't fix all this waste, it's a good first step. And a Canadian company called Okanagan Specialty Fruits is on it.

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Flickr/Quinn Dombrowski

What's the solution?

Okanagan Specialty Fruits recently unveiled a genetically modified, non-browning apple called the Arctic Golden Delicious. Although the US Department of Agriculture approved sale of the fruit February 2015, it will likely be a few more years before it's available at your local grocery store. (Orchards first need to grow and produce the apples.)

Arctic apples don't brown because they make a special type of RNA molecule, which act as the messengers inside living cells, doling out instructions. This special RNA type can interfere with the genes that lead to browning — a mechanism is called RNA interference.

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To coax the apples to create these particular anti-browning RNA molecules, the scientists gave the apple extra copies of the browning gene that were tweaked to set off the plant's interference mechanism. The mechanism then turns off both copies of the browning gene.

This makes the apples stay white (Arctic Apples on the bottom in the image below), even when traditional apples (top) would take on a brownish hue:

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Okanagan Specialty Fruits

The creators hope that their non-browning apple will help solve some of the waste problems, but it could only do so if consumers widely adopt it.

It took Okanagan Specialty Fruits more than two decades and $5 million to develop the non-browning fruit. If people don't buy their apples, it could be a lost cause.

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