- 17 years of data confirm fears of bee decline.
- Slideshow on Egyptian Deserts Genebank; prepare to be astounded.
- Slideshow on US National Plant Germplasm System; prepare to be even more astounded.
- Livestock and climate change, a background paper from ILRI.
- “Most new farmland comes from cutting tropical forest.” The good news: it’s corporate, so can be pressured to stop.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s Super Rice.
Cutting through the hype, there may be some substance in the announcement by the University of Arizona that it is leading a team funded to the tune of USD 9.9 million “to develop ‘super rice’“. 1 The plan is to understand the genomes of all 24 rice species, the better to breed the two species — Oryza sativa and O. glaberrima — that yield the rice crop.
The announcement contains a lot of information about how this effort will help researchers to understand the evolutionary history and current functioning of rice. But there’s also a food security angle, natch.
“During the domestication process, people end up selecting a couple of plants and crossing them,” [said University of Arizona plant scientist Rod] Wing. “This way, one of them became the founder of all the domesticated plants. That variety was then improved over thousands of years, but it contains only a very small variety of genes that could be used for crop improvement.” … This so-called domestication bottleneck leads to crop plants with highly desirable traits such as high yield but deficiencies in other areas such as compromised ability to fight off diseases or cope with droughts.
I expect the researchers might be wondering whether they can duplicate the domestication events that resulted in modern rice, as wheat researchers did in constructing synthetic bread wheats, injecting a whole lot more agricultural biodiversity into the crop.
And here’s a cool idea; spend some of the loot on public awareness:
As an outreach component, the project will include a biannual Plant Science Family Night program at Ventana Vista Elementary School in Tucson, targeting K-5 students and families, with the goal of getting children and their families in the greater Tucson area excited about plants and the role plant science plays in ensuring a safe, sustainable and secure food supply for our planet.
Shouldn’t every big grant do something similar?
Anarchist demo at Pavlovsk
August 31 Pavlovskaia experimental station, the commission came from the Chamber to the closed doors to determine whether it is a unique collection of plants Vavilov retained, or to land occupied by the collection, sold by luxury villas. In response, the anarchists staged an unauthorized picket.
A demonstration? By anarchists? In the Russian Federation? Seems to be an alternative view on the news we reported last night. But please, someone, somewhere, do us a better translation of this.
Featured: Striga
Robert Koebner spills the beans on that Striga-resistant cowpea. It “has the boring name B-301”. and once you know that, it is easy to find out more. There’s a moral in all this too:
The presence of unexpected resistances crops up all the time. A celebrated example is the gene for resistance to wheat eyespot disease, which was detected in a wild relative endemic to the Mediterranean basin, where the eyespot fungus does not exist.
It does make one wonder … how many other things are hiding out there. It might be that it’s a mistake to take the rational view that suggest that it’s more likely that one will find a resistance gene among plant populations where the pathogen is present, or to find salinity tolerance in saline environments etc. But it’s hard to justify such irrationality when it comes to writing a grant proposal!
More’s the pity.
Rough dwarf threatens maize
New pests and diseases keep popping up to destroy poor farmers. Latest culprit, according to SciDev.net, is rough dwarf maize disease in Africa. Very little is known about the disease, but that hasn’t stopped claims that it “will threaten food security and the livelihoods of millions of people on the continent”. 2
We don’t actually like this never-ending parade of pests and diseases, but it does at least remind us that the best insurance is agricultural biodiversity, as a source of other foods and, ultimately, as a source of resistance.