+

70% of the world's macadamia can be traced back to a single tree in Queensland

While we know most of the world's macadamias are grown commercially in Hawaii, the nuts are actually indigenous to Australia. Cathy Nock, a Research Fellow at Southern Cross Plant Science, has undertaken research on this popular nut and has found that 70% of the world's macadamia can be traced back to a single tree in Queensland.

"It was a bit of a shock to see just how narrow the gene pool was from which the Hawaiian cultivars were developed,” Catherine Nock, a plant scientist at Australia’s Southern Cross University and first author of a new paper in Frontiers in Plant Science, tells Jennifer Nichols of ABC News. “They represent about 70 per cent of the trees that are grown in orchards around the world.”

Read the full article at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/most-worlds-macadamias-may-have-originated-single-australian-tree-180972349