Month: July 2010

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Diversity in a fungal symbiont affects rice performance

Nigel Chaffey over at Annals of Botany is really extraordinarily good at finding — and writing about — extraordinarily interesting plant stuff. Plus his Plant Cuttings is free. That’s why I always link to him, either in Nibbles or as a post. His latest offering is particularly agrobiodiversity-laden, with pieces on the results of the CGIAR Science Forum, the bad behaviour of some pollinators, rice, engineering a better photosynthesis, and Newton’s apple tree in space. I could have written a post about any of these, really, but why bother when Prof. Chaffey has done such a great job already?

Having said that, though, I still can’t resist making a particular mention of work by Caroline Angelard and others at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Their paper in Current Biology investigates the symbiotic interaction between an arbusculo-mycorrhizal fungus (AMF) and rice. These fungi consist of a common cytoplasm inhabited by populations of genetically different nuclei. When spores form, different ones end up with different nucleotype complements. Which can get mixed up again through genetic exchange between spores. So what? Well, because all this genetic toing and froing (or, technically, segregation) has only recently been discovered, “no attempts have been made to test whether this affects the symbiosis with plants.” Until now. And it turns out that it does. Segregation “can enhance the growth of rice up to five times, even though neither parental nor crossed AMF lines induced a positive growth response.”

So here’s another level of agricultural diversity to worry about. And what’s the betting that there is genetic diversity in rice as to its response to the genetic diversity of its symbiotic fungi?

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Nibble: Conservation ag, Sahelian famines, Homegarden fertility, Annals of Botany news roundup, Carrot geneflow, Cyanide in crops, Texas rice breeding

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Rooftop sake

There was a fun story about urban beekeepers in Tokyo yesterday. Keeping bees in cities is actually not huge news, though. There’s been a lot about it in the New York press lately, for example. But the Tokyo story also had this intriguing sidebar.

The beekeepers may be an odd sight in the Japanese capital, but they are not the only urban farmers — on a rooftop just blocks away, barefoot farmers were recently wading through almost knee-high mud to plant a wet rice field.

On top of the building of the Hakutsuru Sake Brewing Co., its employees and their spouses and children were screaming with excitement as they stomped barefoot, the mud squelching between their toes.

“Good job, good job! Well done!” said Asami Oda, 56, the vice president of Hakutsuru’s Tokyo office, who takes care of the rice paddies every day.

“We harvest 60 kilograms (130 pounds) of rice every year, from which we make 80 litres of sake. Of course it’s organic. I like having a pesticides-free harvest, which is also good for the honey bees,” he said.

Which made me scurry around the internet looking for photos. And while I was doing that, as coincidence would have it, another piece on rooftop vegetation popped up, this time bamboo on top of a museum. Never rains but it pours.

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Beer drinkers finally get recognition they deserve

We have been keeping an interested eye on the apparent resurgence of sorghum in some parts of Africa, driven by climate change, sure, but also by man’s (and woman’s) unquenchable thirst for beer. The latest story along those happy lines comes from Kenya. It might have remained a mere Nibble, but for the coincidental appearance of a study suggesting that “beer drinkers can serve as role models for the nation as it struggles to emerge from recession.” In Britain and, presumably, in Africa too.

LATER: Oh, and this just in too. A fine day for beer drinkers indeed.

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African Agriculture Science week

“As good as being there.” That’s the very professional blog created by the folks in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso for FARA’s General Assembly and 5th African Agriculture Science week. We’ve linked to the programme before now, and invited submissions, but now we — and you — have a direct line to the goings on. ((There’s also the inevitable Twitter feed, of course.)) Of particular interest so far, the presentation by Bioversity International’s DG Emile Frison on diversity and nutrition, and a wee bit about pollinator diversity.

The Fara week 2010 blog is on our radar, and it raises an interesting question: what happens to the blog and the information in years to come? One-off, purpose-built blogs like this are great, especially when they’re as well put together as this one, but do they have a sustainability plan?

LATER: Oh, and Jules Pretty is pretty good on why everything you think you know about African agriculture is wrong.