Dr Sigrid Heuer of IRRI, the lead author of the rice paper we blogged about a few days back, and which elicited quite some discussion as regards the country of origin of the material identified as having high P use efficiency, has just contributed a long comment.
Thank you very much for the lively discussion on our paper and the origin of Kasalath. I learned a lot in the process and will follow up on this by genotyping the different Kasalath accessions that we have at IRRI and will also ask BRRI to do the same for accessions from Bangladesh.
As you may know from our previous publications on Pup1 (Chin et al 2011 Plant Physiol 156: 1202–1216; Chin et al 2010 Theor Appl Genet 120(6): 1073–1086), we find the tolerant Pup1 haplotype in many stress-adapted varieties of various origins and also in IRRI breeding lines developed for rainfed environments. We mention this in the paper. Whether the Pup1 locus/PSTOL1 has the same origin in all these accessions and whether the gene that we cloned from the one specific Kasalath sample is the “original” gene is not known and might be difficult to determine.
Do read the whole thing. Our thanks to Dr Heuer for taking the time to respond, and for following-up some of the suggestions arising from the discussion.