Better beans on toast Geneticist's new legumes offer a cheaper, more resilient lunch

Geneticist's new legumes offer a cheaper, more resilient lunch

- Lucy Carter

The pan of beans on my cooker has taken a long time to prepare. It's not just because I soaked them overnight and have now simmered them for about an hour; more than 12 years has gone into the creation and production of these beans. After all that, they had better taste delicious.

These beans are the creation of Prof Eric Holub, a geneticist and researcher at the University of Warwick, who has spent more than a decade developing three completely new varieties of beans, specifically engineered to be grown in the UK: UK-Registered Beans, or, for short, URBeans.

The three bean varieties that have resulted from this project - Olivia, Godiva and Capulet, their names inspired by the Warwickshire region - are the offspring of previous work by Holub, who has also developed rot-resistant alfalfa. The technology he used was mechanical pollination, by which pollen is transferred between two parent plants to create genetically optimised offspring.

"There was nothing novel about the technology we used for this initiative. It's been used for hundreds of years. It's conventional breeding and genetics," Holub said. "The key thing was what we were aiming for: a better bean."