The Drum Beat is “a weekly electronic publication exploring initiatives, ideas and trends in communication for development.” This week’s edition focuses on indigenous knowledge and has lots of good stuff, including for example information on an online database of Tibetan folk medicines.
Traditional vegetables update
We finally managed to get up to grandma’s farm at the weekend, so I was able to checkup on my vegetables “experiment”. The photo shows (from the left), two varieties of Amaranthus the seeds of which I got from a market, a variety of Solanum, and a population of Amaranthus derived from seeds we collected from weedy plants on the farm. The Solanum is not doing so well so we weeded it thoroughly and made sure it was taken care a bit more, in particular through watering. The local Amaranthus population is lagging behind the market seed, but doing ok. One of the market varieties (white seeded) is doing better than the other (black seed). We’ve got one harvest off these last two already. Let’s see how long they last.
Climate change and wine
Over at CABI’s blog there’s a great post summarizing some recent research on the possible effects of climate change on the wine industry. The grapevine is very sensitive to temperature and rainfall, making it a useful indicator of environmental change. Predictably, there will be both winners and losers among the traditional wine growing areas. Not quite sure how the average consumer will come out of it, but wine bores will have a whole new area of expertise to get to grips with.
Late blight origins
Ask anyone working in plant genetic resources for an example of the importance of growing genetically diverse crops and chances are that sooner or later they’ll mention the Irish potato famine, caused by the late blight fungus Phytophtora infestans in the 1840s. But for such an important – and iconic – disease, it is amazing how what we think we know about it keeps changing. There’s been a re-think recently about which strain of the fungus actually caused the outbreak in Ireland. And now there’s DNA work to figure out where the pathogen came from. The debate on that point seems now to have been decided in favour of the Andes.
White grapes are mutants
Thought that would get your attention. Actually, what the research summarized here revealed was that a couple of genes mutated independently thousands of years ago in the ancestor of the modern grapevine, whose berries were red. The resulting white variety proved to be the ancestor of almost all of the 3000 or so white grape varieties we have today. This discovery from CSIRO will apparently be useful in marker-assisted breeding.