- Microbiologist makes Guardians of Microbial Diversity award. Agromicrobes awaited.
- Fabulous giant new superinteresting megablog scheduled to launch today.
NoRSS.Yet? - Who likes which yams (by which they mean Dioscorea) in Madagascar? Kew will have answers.
- Genetic diversity invades the zeitgeist, or something.
- Or would you prefer something a little more down to earth?
- Oldest ploughed fields in Czech lands.
- Crazy mixed up report on this weeks new genebank, in
OmanQatar. “Up to 10,000 genes”? Be still my beating heart. - Ich bin ein coco-de-mer-nut.
- Heat speeds up wheat aging. I know how it feels.
- A “Starbucks Of Tortillas”? Sounds worse than it is.
- Welcome news of fundamental work on a “minor” millet.
- IITA goes to jail.
- Genetically modifying cannabis to make it safe to eat. Such a bad idea. On so many levels.
Featured: Lathyrus
This is just a teaser, the start of a long and interesting comment on grasspea from Fernand Lambein, a Belgian scientist.
I respect the authors for trying to put new live into Lathyrus sativus research and for questioning why two generations of efforts did not result in what has been achieved in other crops.
Don’t just take our word for it. Read the whole thing, and be amazed at how useful grasspea can really be.
Any crops, or crop wild relatives, in the eastern Andes?
Well, of course there are. I mean, there must be. But we can’t be sure, at least not as far as this paper in BMC ecology is concerned. The abstract of Plant and animal endemism in the eastern Andean slope: Challenges to conservation tells us that “The Andes-Amazon basin of Peru and Bolivia is one of the most data-poor, biologically rich, and rapidly changing areas of the world” and goes on to say that the scientists “mapped ecological systems, endemic species concentrations, and irreplaceable areas with respect to national level protected areas”. It concludes:
We found that many endemic species and ecological systems are lacking national-level protection; a third of endemic species have distributions completely outside of national protected areas. Protected areas cover only 20% of areas of high endemism and 20% of irreplaceable areas. Almost 40% of the 91 ecological systems are in serious need of protection (=< 2% of their ranges protected).
Are any of the plants they studied wild relatives of crops? How about actual crops? Anyone able to comment?
Nibbles: Blogs, Geographical Indicators, India, Benefits, Forest regeneration, Flypaper
- My favorite agriculture blogs. Can you say “parochial”?
- Want to track Geographical Indicators? Look no further.
- India’s agriculture magazine tackles Agro-Biodiversity For Food Security.
- And GFAR promotes a new initiative to realise the benefits of agrobiodiversity. Love is all around.
- National Plant Genetics Resources Laboratory (NPGRL) at the University of the Philippines at Los Baños checks in to rehab.
- Bioversity scientist plays with fire, for better and more diverse forest regeneration.
- Mutation breeding; Matt explains the lack of breakthroughs in a bit more detail.
- Fabulous, complex story of spiders, flies and microbes. Add ’em together for green flypaper.
Mutation breeding: still a long shot
This is why we love the internets. Because when we say “one to keep an eye on,” what we really mean is, “This seems odd beyond belief”. And fortunately for us, people who really know their stuff are indeed keeping an eye on things. Matthew V Di Leo commented on yesterday’s post, and has given us permission to elevate his comment to a post, which we are doing because it is too long merely to feature.
Calling mutation breeding a “technical revolution,” particularly this implementation of it, appears beyond absurd to me.
I don’t have access (yet) to the full publication that this appears to come from, but from what I can tell they did the following.
- Took a rice variety that was already well known to have a set of traits (pale green leaves and semi-dwarfism) that were associated with high yields
- Mutated a huge number of individuals of another elite line that does not have these traits
- Looked for new mutations that mimic the original trait
- Identified the mutations associated with the phenotype with resequencing and created MAS markers to allow them to clear out the extra mutations
A couple points:
- They didn’t discover agronomically valuable genes de novo–they simply identified them within a known variety. This could also be done by genetic mapping approaches or simply by crossing the plants through traditional breeding and selecting for the right phenotype. Their approach probably speeds up the process by a year or two at most, and might be much more expensive.
- This only worked at all because they had a simple, highly heritable trait that was incredibly easy to measure. This is very rare. Something complex and subtle like yield or salinity resistance ((Which is what all the fuss is about. Ed.)) would be incredibly hard or impossible to do with their approach.
- No matter how you move better genes into your plant, whether by traditional breeding, mutation approaches, or genetic engineering, the total variety development time is rarely much less than 10 years–especially due to the need for multi-year/environment trials.
Thanks again to Matt, who will surely post something more detailed on his own blog.