Author: Luigi Guarino

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Transposuns

EurekAlert summarizes work by Mark Ungerer and his colleagues at Kansas State University which is set to appear in the 24 October issue of Current Biology. They

determined that the genome size differences between … hybrid and parental sunflower species are associated with a massive proliferation of transposable genetic elements that has occurred independently in the genome of each hybrid species.

This is interesting because each of the three hybrid species studied has evolved under strong abiotic stress (in deserts, salt marshes). It has been suggested that both hybridization and abiotic stress can activate and lead to the multiplication of transposable elements, making this a potentially very valuable model system.

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Orchards good for … ahem … wildlife

According to this article in The Independent, “Nature conservationists have called on the Government to protect Britain’s traditional orchards from further destruction, on the grounds that cultivated fruit trees provide a rich habitat for wildlife.” Good to see that their value in providing a rich habitat for traditional varieties of fruit trees is not going unnoticed!

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Linking the agri to the cultural

FAO’s Globally Important Agriculture Heritage Systems (GIAHS) initiative is a potentially really cool way of linking agricultural and cultural heritage. They’ll be having a forum about it in Rome later this month. This will contribute to the development of projects in the following places:

  1. the Inca farming systems of the Peruvian Andes
  2. the oases of the Maghreb countries
  3. the integrated rice-fish system in China
  4. the Ifugao rice terraces systems in the Philippines
  5. Chiloé Island, one of the world centres of origin of potatoes
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Frozen olives

A paper in the Journal of Biogeography reports on the biggest ever microsatellite study of wild and cultivated olives in the Mediterranean. There is a cline in diversity from east to west, suggesting that perhaps the wild olive in the west is feral rather than truly wild, but this study suggests that the wild olive spread out of 7 RPOPs, or reconstructed panmictic oleaster populations, in both eastern and western Mediterranean, possibly located in glacial refugia. Cultivated olives were domesticated in several RPOPs, and mediated geneflow in the wild species as they were spread around my humans. Has this business of glacial refugia been looked at for other cultivated trees in Europe?