Discovery of New Olive Varieties in Italy Spurs App Development

Two pre­vi­ously unknown olive cul­ti­vars have been dis­cov­ered in Frosinone, a province in the cen­tral Italian region of Lazio.

The Italian National Research Center (CNR) lab­o­ra­tory tested sev­eral tree sam­ples and con­firmed that their DNA does not match any known vari­ety listed in the IBBR-CNR data­base in Perugia.

The data­base includes more than 5,000 genetic pro­files and a repos­i­tory with more than 10,000 sam­ples.

CNR’s analy­ses indi­cated that the two newly found cul­ti­vars might be genet­i­cally related to cul­ti­vars in Veneto, a north­ern Italian region, par­tic­u­larly the Favarol vari­ety.

“They are trees that orig­i­nated in our region and have thrived here for cen­turies,” Pierluigi Turchetta, the olive grower who dis­cov­ered the new vari­eties, told Olive Oil Times.

He added that the dis­cov­ery did not sur­prise him. ​“We were specif­i­cally search­ing for native olive cul­ti­vars in our region because we sus­pected that some trees did not belong to the typ­i­cal cul­ti­vars here,” Turchetta said. ​“However, we could­n’t be cer­tain.”

“We decided to send four sam­ples to the CNR spe­cial­ized lab­o­ra­tory,” he added. ​“Two sam­ples revealed the unique nature of at least some of our trees.”

While a few more steps are needed to for­mally include these vari­eties in the offi­cial list of Italian olive cul­ti­vars, local grow­ers hope this dis­cov­ery could estab­lish a new area for cer­ti­fied-ori­gin olive oil pro­duc­tion.

Such geo­graph­i­cal indi­ca­tions are fun­da­men­tal to the European Union’s Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) cer­ti­fi­ca­tions, which link food to its unique pro­duc­tion area and enhance the value of local prod­ucts.

Recently, researchers found 21 pre­vi­ously unknown olive vari­eties on Capri, an island dot­ted with olive trees since ancient times.

“Olive tree bio­di­ver­sity car­ries sig­nif­i­cant value from an envi­ron­men­tal and eco­log­i­cal per­spec­tive,” said Thomas Vatrano, olive oil taster and agron­o­mist. ​“It dynam­i­cally inter­acts with all liv­ing organ­isms in a ter­ri­tory, mak­ing it thrive.”

According to Vatrano, olive tree bio­di­ver­sity is cru­cial in times of cli­mate change. ​“Look at south­ern Italy, where pro­longed water stress impacts olive oil qual­ity annu­ally,” he said.

“Ancient olive groves in regions like Calabria act as guardians of these ter­ri­to­ries and resist drought well, offer­ing a strat­egy to mit­i­gate cli­mate change,” Vatrano added.

Trees with high adapt­abil­ity in harsh cli­mates may also pro­vide valu­able insights into pre­vent­ing the spread of emerg­ing dis­eases.

“The Mediterranean basin is the largest olive-grow­ing area glob­ally,” Vatrano said. ​“The risky choice of vari­eties for oil yield or mar­ket needs has led to the aban­don­ment of native vari­eties in favor of for­eign or national ones.”

“This bio­di­ver­sity loss can make a dif­fer­ence in resis­tance strate­gies against new pathogens or pests,” he added.

Vatrano empha­sized that the dis­cov­ery of new olive tree vari­eties in Italy will con­tinue.

“Italy holds about 30 per­cent of the world’s olive germplasm,” he said. ​“The num­ber of vari­eties is under­es­ti­mated, as unknown indi­vid­u­als are fre­quently dis­cov­ered through mod­ern mol­e­c­u­lar biol­ogy tech­niques.”

According to Turchetta, the newly found vari­eties could yield sig­nif­i­cant results for olive grow­ers.

“We tasted the olive oil pro­duced by these trees with expert tasters and found the qual­ity truly inter­est­ing,” he said. ​“Hence, we have already invested in their prop­a­ga­tion.”

“Currently, we are plant­ing hun­dreds of trees, with 600 young olive trees for each cul­ti­var,” Turchetta added.

Turchetta is also devel­op­ing a mobile app using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to iden­tify spe­cific cul­ti­vars quickly.

“With a team of young coders, we have devel­oped an app that can iden­tify olive trees,” he said. It can indi­cate, for instance, ​‘this olive tree seems to be a Leccino’ with a con­fi­dence level of, say, 80 per­cent.”

While mol­e­c­u­lar genetic analy­sis is nec­es­sary for com­plete results, Turchetta said the app addresses a com­mon ques­tion among olive grow­ers.

“A beta ver­sion of the Olivamea App is avail­able for Android, and an iPhone ver­sion will soon fol­low, with the offi­cial launch set on June 21^st,” he said.