The new issue of the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis has reviews of food composition activities in both Latin America and Oceania. I only have access to the abstracts, but I know that in the Pacific a lot of attention is being paid to differences in nutrient composition among varieties of crops like banana, pandanus and giant swamp taro. This is something that might be of interest to the authors of a third paper in the same issue of the journal. They look at differences in micronutrient composition within different cereal species in Mali but fail to mention this varietal dimension. They ascribe the differences to climate and ecology — at least in the abstract. Important, of course, but surely not the whole story. I’m going to try to get hold of the paper.
LATER: So it looks like what they did is collect various different samples of fonio, say, in each of several distinct eco-geographic zones and pool the samples collected in each zone for analysis. Nothing in the paper about trying to collect material with similar varietal names or anything like that. So any differences due to environment will be confounded with genetic variation. Seems to me like an opportunity missed, at best.
We can expect a lot more on micronutrient content of staple crops coming out of the HarvestPlus project (www.harvestplus.org). For most of the important staple crops breeders have screened germplasm collections to try to get an idea of the genetic diversity that can tap to breed high-micronutrient content crops.
Thanks, Glenn. It would be good to have figures for the percentage of the accessions in the germplasm collections of the main staples that have been screened for nutrients. If I had to guess, I would say that even for something like the major nutritional characteristics of wheat or rice, let alone micronutrients, maybe 5-10% of the CGIAR collections have been screened. If that. But maybe somebody can tell me how pathetically wrong I am.