- As if Japan doesn’t have enough to worry about, its sake is in trouble.
- Update on that Idaho Heritage Tree Project.
- Why local cuisine is best. Who needs fusion, eh?
- Sweet potato leaves are good, and good for you. But you can’t eat them if they’re not part of your local cuisine.
- Same goes for baobab.
- New Samara has report on crop wild relatives training in Uganda.
- A medicinal plant garden in Philadelphia.
- How can we improve agriculture to reduce the pressure in forested areas? One of the top 20 questions for forestry and landscapes, apparently.
Food Security and Genetic Diversity live, now
The Commission on Genetic Resources will hold its Fifteenth Regular Session from 19 to 23 January 2015 at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Headquarter in Rome, Italy. But today, there’s a Special Event on Food Security and Genetic Diversity. Watch it live. And yes, there’s a hashtag.
The Special Event offers an excellent opportunity for delegates of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, policy makers and experts to discuss and exchange information and knowledge regarding linkages between the conservation and sustainable use of genetic resources for food and agriculture and the eradication of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition. It also allows exploring opportunities to strengthen and improve these linkages and to engage in a dialogue on genetic resources and food security.
And here’s a summary from IISD.
All maize, all the time
Lots on maize on the interwebs lately. First, there was a Nature Plants paper on the origin of the crop in the southwestern US, comparing DNA from ancient cobs with that from Mexican landraces:
“When considered together, the results suggest that the maize of the U.S. Southwest had a complex origin, first entering the U.S. via a highland route about 4,100 years ago and later via a lowland coastal route about 2,000 years ago,” said Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, an associate professor in the Department of Plant Sciences.
A separate article in the journal summarized the results and set them in a wider context:
As genomic and palaeo-genomic studies have become more common, it has become increasingly clear that virtually every domestic plant and animal has incorporated genomes of numerous populations, including many that were not involved in the original domestication process. For example, although grapes, apples and pigs were domesticated outside of Europe, admixture with native wild European species has been so significant as to obscure the geographic origins of the modern domestic populations.
Meanwhile, the controversy over how to measure genetic erosion in maize continues, though I’m afraid in this case only the extract is free.
Which all means that the rather nice learning resource on maize domestication at the University of Utah, which I coincidentally recently came across, may need to be tweaked a bit.
Incidentally, if you plug Zea into the Native American Ethnobotany database at the University of Michigan, also a serendipitous find over the holidays, you’ll see that maize was far from being just a food plant.
There are even a couple of historical maize specimens included in the beta version of the new data portal of the Natural History Museum in London, which seems to be getting the softest of launches just now. Great to browse through. Not sure what kind of launch Brazil’s new(ish) biodiversity information system (SiBBs) got, but it too features maize records, over 400 in this case, though only 10 georeferenced. The source of most is given as “Dados repatriados – United States (no coordinates)”, which means that they came from GBIF, and in the case of maize are probably therefore mostly from GRIN. As I said a couple of posts ago for wheat, data sure does get around online.
Featured: Cacao funding
Chris Turnbull explains the funding of the new home of the International Cocoa Quarantine Centre at the University of Reading:
As you point out, the cocoa quarantine facility at the University of Reading has actually been running for about 30 years, supported by the UK chocolate and cocoa industry, through the Cocoa Research Association (CRA) Ltd., with equal funding coming from the USDA Agricultural Research Service since 2007. The move to the new and improved facilities was supported by the University in order to safeguard this important resource as part of the redevelopment of the old site.
Many thanks for the clarification. Great to see University funding going to this important component of the global system of cacao genetic diversity conservation and use.
ICARDA genebank to get award
The Gregor Mendel Foundation, established in 2002, proposes to focus on the importance and innovative potential of plant breeding. The founders are personalities and families with dedication to plant breeding for generations. The “Gregor Mendel Innovation Prize” is awarded to individuals who rendered outstanding services to innovation in plant breeding.
Delighted to hear that this year’s prize will be awarded to Dr Mahmoud Solh, Director General of ICARDA, on behalf of the institute’s genebank team:
…who were able to maintain the gene bank in Syria despite the challenging conditions of civil war and to send duplicates of the genetic material to other gene banks, e.g. in Spitzbergen. This ICARDA collection is a unique resource for scientists around the world in their search for genes suitable for national and international breeding programmes in order to develop drought tolerant and disease and pest resistant varieties which can be cultivated even under changing climate conditions.
The ceremony will take place on 19 March in Berlin. Richly deserved, I’m sure we all agree. It was only a couple of months ago that I had this to say:
…it was unbelievable to me that, despite everything, ICARDA staff in Aleppo are still somehow managing to keep the genebank going. That, perhaps, is the most remarkable of the achievements of the amazing, yet largely unsung, group of people who run genebanks, international and otherwise — not just in Aleppo but also in Lima, Cali, Texcoco, Leuven, Cotonou, Ibadan, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Hyderabad, Los Banos, Suva, Shanhua, Arusha, Entebbe, Muguga… — and some of whose representatives met in the shadow of Mt Meru earlier this month. We owe them all so much, and I don’t think they hear that enough.
So glad to be proved wrong.