Fish farming helps Malawians.
The state of animal genetic resources
FAO director general worries about animal genetic resources.
Ethiopia goes for decaf
Reuters reports that Ethiopian coffee farmers will soon be able to grow a variety which is naturally low in caffeine. Details are sketchy. The whole thing seems to be based on the following statement by Mr Abera Deressa, State Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, at an unnamed coffee research conference:
“Coffee research centres are in the process of planting seedlings of natural coffee with low caffeine varieties, to enable Ethiopia to supply the world market within the shortest possible time.”
The article mentions the 2004 controversy between the Ethiopian government and Brazilian researcher Paulo Mazzafera, who
declared he had discovered a variety of naturally decaffeinated coffee from 6,000 specimens collected in Ethiopia in the 1980s. The find sparked a dispute with Ethiopian authorities who accused him of taking the bushes without permission.
However, it is not clear whether the low-caffeine variety now being planted in research centres has anything to do with the one Mazzafera identified.
Decaffeinated coffee accounts for 10 percent of total coffee sales in the world, a multibillion-dollar industry. Natural decaf brews could dominate over the current chemically caffeine-reduced options in today’s health-conscious market.
The story has been picked up all over the place. It should run and run. Hopefully we’ll get some more details soon.
Wheats and gluten
Sometimes it takes some personal connection to get me motivated enough to try and understand something a little more fully. Laziness, I guess. Anyway, for example, I vaguely knew about the gluten seed storage proteins of wheat and the coeliac disease they cause in about 1% of the population. But I decided to delve a little deeper only when an old friend I hadn’t seen for a while visited today and told me that she was a sufferer, and that she needed to know how to describe the condition in italian so she wouldn’t get into trouble eating in restaurants here in Rome.
Having sorted that out, I was interested to know whether there are differences among wheat species in the “toxicity” of their glutens. You’ll remember that wheat comes in a polyploid series: diploid, tetraploids and hexaploids. And that three distinct genomes are involved: AA, BB and DD. Diploid einkorn (AA) and BB genome species got together to form tetraploid emmer and durum wheat (AABB). And these hybridized with wild diploid Triticum tauschii to make hexaploid (AABBDD) bread wheat.
It turns out that differences in gluten toxicity do exist. An analysis of the ancestral A, B and D genomes of wheat found that DNA sequences associated with 4 peptides that have been identified as triggering a response in coeliac patients are not distributed at random. For example, the B genome sequences analyzed did not reveal any of the “guilty” sequences.
On the basis of such insight, breeding strategies can be designed to generate less toxic varieties of wheat which may be tolerated by at least part of the [coelic disease] patient population.
Oh, and coeliac disease is called celiachia in italian.
Bats suck
Another great example of the interaction between wild and domesticated biodiversity. As the rain forest is cleared for ranching in Latin America, its blood-sucking bats are increasingly turning from tapirs and the like to cattle as something juicy to sink their teeth into. This is also leading to an uptick in rabies cases among humans.