Author: Luigi Guarino

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Genotyping Support Service

The CGIAR’s Generation Challenge Programme‘s mission is

To use advanced genomics science and plant genetic diversity to overcome complex agricultural bottlenecks that condemn millions of the world’s neediest people to a future of poverty and hunger

They’ve just announced a new service: the Genotyping Support Service. What will GSS do?

Here’s a sample of what our latest service offers: assessing proposals, hiring genotyping services from the best providers, taking care of the administrative hassles, ensuring the generation of high-quality data and training participating researchers to interpret and work with the data to optimise outputs. In this way, researchers get to use the technology right away, while also learning how to get the greatest mileage out of the technology, thus creating local capacity. As such, GSS contributes to GCP’s effort to support and motivate plant breeding ‘champions’ in developing regions.

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The galactagogous flicker

So I’ve learnt a new word today: galactagogue, a substance that induces lactation. I came across it in the title of a paper ((Steve Froemming. Traditional use of the Andean flicker (Colaptes rupicola) as a galactagogue in the Peruvian Andes. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 2006, 2:23)) in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, which seems to be admirably open access. The substance in question is the dried carcass of a bird called the Andean Flicker:

The bird’s use as a galactagogue appears to be motivated by both metaphorical associations and its perceived efficacy, and conceptually blends human and animal healthcare domains.

It’s really fascinating stuff. The paper has a list of Andean galactagogues, which includes many preparations derived from crops. Various wild plants and herbs are also used in this way in Europe, and some of the Andean remedies are likely to have been introduced in the 16th century, while others are native to the region. The flicker seems to be a pre-Colombian practice.

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More on iron

As coincidence would have it, just a few days after Jeremy blogged about iron deficiency and what could be done about it, Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog flagged a paper on the diversity that exists among human populations in their predisposition to this problem. More specifically, the paper is about hemochromatosis ((Christopher Naugler. Hemochromatosis: A Neolithic adaptation to cereal grain diets. Medical hypotheses. 2007/08/10.)), an hereditary disorder that causes body tissues like the liver to absorb and store more iron than “normal.”

The hypothesis advanced by the author is that the condition arose in Neolithic farming communities as an adaptation to the lower levels of iron in a cereals-based diet as the shift from more iron-rich hunter-gatherer diets accelerated. Highlighting the complexity of nutritional issues, however, is the fact that prevalence of the guilty allele is lower in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern than in northern European agrarian regions, possibly because of the higher dietary intake of vitamin C down south — vitamin C assists in iron uptake. Such interactions are one reason why nutritional silver bullets are unlikely to exist.