Jeremy Cherfas

April 15, 2013

New beer from old hops

Dept. of shameless self-promotion: A little while ago, Luigi nibbled a heart-warming tale of beer and genebanks; to whit, a hop variety that British brewers rejected as too tasty in 1960, and that found new favour as in-your-face American craft brews changed some beer drinkers’ ideas of what their tipple should taste like. And the reason hop OZ97a was still around for brewers to re-evaluate was that it had been maintained in a field genebank for more than 60 years. Meat and drink for the latest Eat This Podcast, where I interviewed Mark Dredge, the beer writer who broke the story.

Who knows what other flavours lurk uncharacterised among the diverse hops?

April 15, 2013April 15, 2013

Nibbles: Sesame, ABS, Symposium, Yield sensitivity, NUS Symposium proceedings, Food Fest, Typha pollen, Arepas

Texan farmers have solved the problem of open sesame – with non-shattering varieties.
They’re protected by patents, of course. No need then for handy dandy guidelines to access and benefit sharing in research projects.
But you just know that ABS will be a hot topic when they round up the usual suspects for the International Symposium on Agrobiodiversity for Sustainable Development.
As will the question of whether yields are becoming more or less sensitive to temperature.
I wonder how quickly the proceedings of that shindig will become available. It took the 2nd International Symposium on Underutilised Species less than two years! Course, they’re still not open access …
No free access to the IncrEdibles festival at Kew either. And why should there be?
I’m willing to guarantee that cat-tail pollen will not be featured at Kew.
Arepas, on the other hand…

April 15, 2013April 15, 2013

Featured: GM for conservation

Luigi wondered why there was no back-up of a favoured banana in a global collection. Anne Vezina thinks there’s no need, and suggests that GM could conserve banana diversity.

Indian scientists are exploring GM to make hill bananas, which also have a GI designation, resistant to the bunchy top virus. For Fusarium, a neat system to make bananas resistant to the fungus is being developed in Australia.

In a previous post, you argued that GM bananas threaten crop diversity. Here’s one example how it would actually contribute to conserving a piece of diversity, especially given the difficulty of controlling Fusarium using management measures.

Ah, but would it be the same variety?

April 10, 2013

Nibbles: Goats, Tomato clones, Wheat breeding

Rwandan women receive gift of goats. Now all they need is to get over the taboo on drinking goat milk.
Immortal tomatoes. Oh no! They’re clones! Eeeeeek!
Breeding heat-tolerant wheats. Wonder whether they’ll be doing it with doubled haploids.

April 10, 2013

Featured: Svalbard from the horse’s mouth

Cary Fowler clarifies matters:

Just to be clear, Svalbard does NOT impose SMTA requirements on countries that deposit. (Cases in point: the 69,000+ samples deposited by the U.S. and the 2,000+ deposited by the Seed Savers Exchange, an NGO.)

Treaty Parties and non-Parties alike are making use of the Seed Vault and use by non-Parties does not change the legal status of those deposits at all.

You can believe that if you want to.