- Nagib Nassar challenges the wisdom of GM cassava. Cultivate indigenous and wild varieties of the crop!
- Or fonio (Digitaria exilis). New paper on its diversity.
- And for dessert? Wild apple diversity?
- Need salad? How about Salicornia then?
- Nice aurochs steak to go with the salad?
- Not too soon to start planning a future harvest, if you’re in Ireland and want seeds.
Healing plants of Kenya
The BBC has a nice slide show on the Earthwatch Institute’s medicinal plants project with a Samburu community in Kenya.
Extension services cancelled
We were kind of sorry this morning, taking a glance at the IFPRI website this morning, to see our worst fears about the collapse of agricultural extension systems confirmed.
Of course it’s a cheap shot, but what’s the point of owning and operating a global web publishing empire if you can’t take the odd cheap shot?
Assuming genebanks
Most crop geneticists agree that enrichment of the cultivated gene pool will be necessary to meet the challenges that lie ahead. However, to fully capitalize on the extensive reservoir of favorable alleles within wild germplasm, many advances are still needed. These include increasing our understanding of the molecular basis for key traits, expanding the phenotyping and genotyping of germplasm collections, improving our molecular understanding of recombination in order to enhance rates of introgression of alien chromosome regions, and developing new breeding strategies that permit introgression of multiple traits. Recent progress has shown that each of these challenges is tractable and within reach if some of the basic problems limiting the application of new technologies can be tackled.
That’s from Breeding Technologies to Increase Crop Production in a Changing World, part of the recent Science special feature on food security. Sure, the challenges of use are tractable. But what if those germplasm collections are inadequate in their coverage, accessibility, management or funding? As ever, genebanks are pretty much taken for granted in these sorts of discussions.
Nibbles: Patents, Wheat value, Maize, Perennial crops, Mango killer
- US, Brazil patent gene from Tanzanian sorghum. What could possibly go wrong?
- How much is wheat diversity worth? CIMMYT book tells you.
- More corn colour stuff from James.
- The promise of perenniality.
- Mango killer fungus on the rampage in the Gulf. Any resistant varieties? We’ll soon find out, I guess.