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by Luigi Guarino on August 31, 2009
Mark Nesbitt knows who the Director of Agriculture is Tanzania was in 1934:
The sorghum collection – all 956 accessions – was acquired by J.D. Snowden while working on his 1936 book (still in print!) “Cultivated Races of Sorghum”. It’s a perfect example of a collection that 20 years ago would have seemed useless (old seeds, mostly dead) but thanks to new techniques (DNA analysis) suddenly looks very interesting as a record of landrace distribution before the Green Revolution.
So, any gene jockeys out there interested in extracting DNA from old seeds? Just for information, there are 1058 sorghum accessions from Tanzania in Genesys. How much can it cost to run a bunch of microsatellites on 2,000 samples?
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Fantastic. A real communicator in action. An excellent exercise of rhetoric (in the best sense). A talk of 17’10” and only 11 slides and an audience completed “glued” in the words. The message will pass on …
Great talk.
It’s a wonderful talk, very well argued. I met Cary in Stockholm a long time ago. He and Roy Pat Mooney are the heros of our time, in a very humble and unassuming way.