Dr KC Bansal, director of India’s national genebank at the National Bureau for Plant Genetic Resources was interviewed on the TV show Eureka recently. Well worth listening to his advocacy for agricultural R&D in general and genebanks in particular. He says he is particularly proud of NBPGR’s wheat characterization work. BTW, the lakh is a unit in the Indian Numbering System equal to one hundred thousand. NBPGR has approximately 4 lakh accessions.
Nibbles: Genebank data, Edible smut, Edible bugs, Healthful bluberries, Mining Indian food, Funny spuds pix, Old grape pits, Old einkorn stash, Phylogeny & conservation double, Rhizobacteria, Rapid phenotyping, Plata periurban ag, BRICs in Africa, Chinese terraces, SMTA
- GRIN-Global comes to Portugal. That makes two.
- Eating fungi.
- Eating bugs.
- Eating Indian.
- Eating blueberries is good for you.
- Would you eat these funny-looking potatoes?
- Veg ink.
- Old grape seed in Israel.
- Old einkorn seed in England.
- Atlas of Living Australia to include phylogenetic data. Kew thinking along same lines too.
- Grasses can absorb organic N. With some help.
- “Today’s international scientific community is dominated by big mercenaries who change their teams’ research subjects to get on the cover of Nature.” But INRA isn’t like that, apparently, at least with regards to high-throughput phenotyping.
- Argentinian periurban farmers grow varieties they like to eat. Well, it’s good to have the data.
- Rounding up China and Brazil in African agriculture.
- Meanwhile, back home, famous rice terraces are being used to grow maize.
- SMTA 101.
Apples in the snow
You may have heard about the difficult weather hitting the northeast of the United States. That includes Geneva, in New York State, which is home to the US national apple and grape genebank. Well, thanks to Thomas Chao, who’s in charge of those collections, you can now have a see what a field collection of apple looks like under a metre of snow. Here’s the core collections.
And this is a view of the general collection.
Thomas says these apples should be fine, though he’s a bit worried about some of the grapes. Fingers crossed.
People take genebanks for granted. But they take a lot of looking after, and they can be so vulnerable it is scary.
Featured: MGIS
Max Ruas addresses some of the nerdy MGIS issues we raised:
Regarding the USDA collection based in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, we will correct the FAO CODE in order to be compliant with Genesys, in particular since MGIS is a data provider of Genesys. Then, for the discrepancy of accessions count, this is due to the fact that we now make visible only alive accessions while we provided to Genesys also with lost and eliminated accessions some month ago. It will be fixed as well for consistencies reasons.
Thanks for listening, Max. We look forward to future releases.
Kew does crops
Nice to see crop wild relatives highlighted in several places in Kew’s new science strategy. Full disclosure: I work with the Millennium Seed Bank on CWR for my day job. But that was no guarantee that the subject would get such a high profile in the science strategy.