Luigi Guarino

September 8, 2021September 8, 2021

How to genebank, and why

The third edition of “Strategies and guidelines for developing, managing and utilising ex situ collections” from the Australian Network for Plant Conservation is out and it’s nothing short of monumental. Here’s the contents.

Chapter 1: Introduction.
Chapter 2: Options, major considerations and preparation for plant germplasm conservation.
Chapter 3: Genetic guidelines for acquiring and maintaining collections for ex situ conservation.
Chapter 4: Seed and vegetative material collection.
Chapter 5: Seed banking: orthodox seeds.
Chapter 6: Identifying and conserving non-orthodox seeds.
Chapter 7: Seed germination and dormancy.
Chapter 8: The role of the plant nursery in ex situ conservation.
Chapter 9: Tissue culture.
Chapter 10: Cryopreservation.
Chapter 11: Living plant collections.
Chapter 12: Isolation, propagation and storage of orchid mycorrhiza and legume rhizobia.
Chapter 13: Special collections and under-represented taxa in Australasian ex situ conservation programs.
Chapter 14: Risk management and preparing for crises.
Chapter 15: Maintenance, utilisation and information storage.

There are also 50 case studies, focusing on Australian examples, including this on sorghum wild relatives.

And, given the news about the threats to crop wild relatives and trees, it’s all just as well.

September 7, 2021September 7, 2021

Nibbles: Genebanks in Brazil, Tunisia, Ghana, Ethiopia, Goan rice, Wheat adoption, Peruvian hot peppers & cacao, Amazonian fruits and nuts, Dates, Great Hedge of India, Conservation genetics presentation

Safety duplicating a chickpea collection.
Tunisia’s genebank in the news.
Ghana’s genebank trying to save taro.
Using a genebank to improve Elephant grass.
On-farm conservation of rice in Goa.
Molecular tools show that a couple of varieties account for about half the wheat acreage in Bangladesh and Nepal. Hope all the landraces are in genebanks, and safety duplicated.
Celebrating Peruvian pepper diversity.
Peru’s cacao diversity doesn’t need help, apparently.
However, the Amazon’s wild-extracted fruits (including cacao and a wild relative) could be in trouble. Hope they’re in genebanks, just in case.
How the date came to the US. Including its genebanks.
India had a precursor of the Green Wall of Africa but nobody remembers it. Glad it wasn’t used as a genebank of sorts.
Conservation genetics (i.e., most of the above) explained in 48 slides.

September 6, 2021August 31, 2021

Brainfood: Extreme events, Hot livestock, Decentralized breeding, Rice evaluation, Maize relatives double, Peanut hybrids, Tanzanian cassava, Microbiome, Brassica pests, Hop terroir, Beer taste

Extreme climate events increase risk of global food insecurity and adaptation needs. Factoring in climate variability shows that just considering the change in the average climate underestimates the food security hit.
Increases in extreme heat stress in domesticated livestock species during the twenty-first century. And the hit is already landing.
Data-driven decentralized breeding increases prediction accuracy in a challenging crop production environment. What we therefore need is 3-D breeding.
Novel Sources of Pre-Harvest Sprouting Resistance for Japonica Rice Improvement. Including for resistance to pre-harvest sprouting in rice due to unexpected typhoons.
The genome of stress tolerant crop wild relative Paspalum vaginatum leads to increased biomass productivity in the crop Zea mays. For sure crop wild relatives are going to help.
Megabase-scale presence-absence variation with Tripsacum origin was under selection during maize domestication and adaptation. If they haven’t helped already.
Registration of three peanut allotetraploid interspecific hybrids resistant to late leaf spot disease and tomato spotted wilt. Sometimes you need multiple CWR.
Collection, genotyping and virus elimination of cassava landraces from Tanzania and documentation of farmer knowledge. But landraces too will come in handy, especially if farmers’ knowledge is properly documented.
Prioritizing host phenotype to understand microbiome heritability in plants. And don’t forget the microbiome.
Economic analysis of habitat manipulation in Brassica pest management: Wild plant species suppress cabbage webworm. Not to mention the ecosystem as a whole.
Relevance of hop terroir for beer flavour. Oh hell, I give up, time for a craft beer.
On the Trail of the German Purity Law: Distinguishing the Metabolic Signatures of Wheat, Corn and Rice in Beer. Maybe even a weissbier.

September 2, 2021September 6, 2021

Nibbles: Eat This Newsletter, Basmati, DSI, NBPGR collecting, Ganja page

Jeremy’s latest newsletter covers in more depth things we just Nibbled here, including perry and ancient bananas, plus much other stuff. We talked about “wild rice” here a couple of times.
As for actual rice, the controversy between India and Pakistan about the origin of Basmati just got a bit more complicated. Could it in fact have come from Afghanistan?
Maybe everyone should listen to Dr Amber Scholz’s ideas about ABS.
Meanwhile, India’s National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources regional centre in Kumaon has been busy collecting germplasm. No word on whether that includes rice, Basmati or otherwise.
Pretty cool way of presenting accession data, courtesy of Mystery Haze. I wonder where that’s from originally.

September 2, 2021September 2, 2021

Double de-coupling ABS

Dr Amber Hartman Scholz gave the latest GROW Webinar last week, and her talk and PowerPoint are now online: “Digital Sequence Information: A Looming Disaster or Hidden Opportunity for Positive Change?”

Dr Scholz has been working on the project Wissenschaftliche Lösungsansätze für Digitale Sequenzinformation (Scientific approaches for digital sequence information), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, about which we have blogged before. If you’re interested in biodiversity access and benefit sharing (ABS), and in particular what to do about digital sequence information (DSI), it’s well worth listening to the presentation and Q&A as a whole.

But here’s a spoiler: Dr Scholz is optimistic that there may be a way forward in what she calls “de-coupling.” That is, not tying benefit sharing to access to a particular bit of DSI, but rather designing a system whereby fee-paying membership of a club allows access to all DSI.

That sounds like the subscription system that the Plant Treaty has been considering for a while. So Dr Scholz is really suggesting a double de-coupling, because her idea would also de-couple ABS on the physical material from ABS on DIS, resulting in two parallel but connected multilateral systems.

Thoughts?