In following up a recent University of Nottingham press release (nibbled a few days ago) on a project to breed vegetables with higher levels of Ca and Mg I came across an earlier, related project by the principal investigator, Dr Martin Broadley. This was to evaluate P-use efficiency (PUE) in Brassica oleracea as a model system. There’s lots of genetics, but also this objective:
Determine the PUE of up to 50 commercial B. oleracea varieties and 400 varieties from the HRI Genetic Resources Unit (GRU) representing a wide geographical and genetic distribution of B. oleracea and close relatives
And this deliverable:
A database of Brassica oleracea PUE phenotypes. This database will identify the range of PUE in modern varieties. This will allow varieties to be matched to their nutritional environment. The range of PUE found in accessions in the HRI-Genetic Resources Unit (GRU) will also be defined. This database will be delivered to growers, via a summary factsheet and subsequent consultation.
Cool, I thought. Rather complicated evaluation information on an important collection made readily available to users (breeders, growers, researchers) in a natty database. I had visions of Andy Jarvis and his crew mapping the provenance of accessions on soils base maps to look for correlations between PRU and low P. Problem is, though the dataset is probably somewhere on brassica.info, I wasn’t able to track it down in over half an hour of messing around. No doubt I’m missing something which is right in front of my nose. Alas, the link provided in the project final report seems to be broken. I suspect the data I’m looking for is lurking in the supplementary tables on the project webpage at Defra, but a bunch of spreadsheets is not really what was promised. Another soul-sapping foray into genebank database hell.