SUPER WINE

Call it “bionic wine”. Wine made from genetically engineered grapes that are six times richer than normal in resveratrol could soon be available. Yuejin Wang and colleagues at the Northwest Agricultural and Forestry University in Yangling, Shaanxi province, China, made the supervine by equipping it with an extra gene from a wild Chinese vine. Vitus pseudoreticulata has an unusual variant of the stilbene synthase gene, which triggers resveratrol production. The team plans to make wine from the vine, though their main goal is to make grapevines more resistant to fungus, which is kept in check by resveratrol.