I think we may have blogged before about a series of educational videos on the management of the rice crop aimed at your actual rice farmer. But there’s no harm in mentioning them again, especially since it gives me the opportunity of linking to the very useful resource centre of the Global Farmer Field School Network, which brings them all together and packages them with additional information. The site is serchable, and a quick look revealed quite a few interesting things on agrobiodiversity. Again, thanks to the indefatigable Danny for the link.
BGCI Video Project
Botanic Gardens Conservation International wants YOU to make a film! I hope some of them at least will be about the agricultural biodiversity that botanic gardens conserve and study — crop wild relatives, for example. But hey, don’t forget we have a video competition here too!
Rice, China and climate change
Remember Jeremy has an omnibus post about Chinese agrobiodiversity.
Responding to salinity
Aussies breed salt-tolerant wheat.
Can wild relatives survive introgression?
Crops can benefit from the introgression of genes from their wild relatives, but what about the other way around? Is the survival of crop wild relatives jeopardized by the “genetic pollution” caused by hybridization with the cultigen? A paper just out in the Journal of Applied Biology takes an experimental and modeling approach to answering this question 2.
The researchers monitored the germination, survival and seed-set of hybrids between wild (Lactuca serriola) and cultivated lettuce (L. sativa). The overall fitness of hybrids was higher than that of the “unpolluted” wild relative in the first couple of generations, but as those hybrids were selfed and backcrossed, their fitness decreased. These data were then entered into a model, to see what would happen over time to a L. serriola population exposed to geneflow from the cultigen. What happens is that the wild relative can indeed be completely displaced by hybrids, but that is not a foregone conclusion, and in any case displacement, if it takes place, will not be as rapid as predicted by previous models which did not take into account the breakdown in heterosis.
So genetic pollution does pose a real threat to crop wild relatives in the field 3, but perhaps not as great as some have suggested. And in any case we now seem to have a model that can be used to assess the risk of genetic pollution, including by transgenes.