- This quinoa thing is getting tedious.
- Clinton brings a seed bank to Haiti, “which will support efforts to increase agricultural production.” Will be interesting to see how exactly it does that.
- Whereas this seed bank in Guatemala “is empowering the local community to preserve and grow the seeds.” So there you go.
- Of course, those seed banks are going to need seed systems. And vice versa.
- And the next milestone in the continuing disempowering of the farmer is…
- Orange-fleshed sweet potatoes go aquatic. Where they’ll find fish that need to be compared.
- A Tongan vanilla tour.
Farmersourcing germplasm evaluation
Our friend and occasional contributor Jacob van Etten has been busy. He has a piece out over at the CCAFS blog describing his work in India on crowdsourcing the evaluation of wheat varieties in the context of climate change adaptation which has been attracting some attention. He’s blogged here before about getting seeds out to farmers, but he’s also published a bit more formally on the subject, and seems now to be putting his theories into practice now at Bioversity. More power to him. If you’d like to hear him explaining his work, rather than just reading about it, you can do that too.
A bit surprisingly, Jacob doesn’t particularly highlight 1 the role of genebanks in his CCAFS piece. It would be interesting to know why. Perhaps he can tell us here. Or on his Twitter account. Anyway, I’ve found a diagram on his Facebook page which suggests that he does think genebanks have a key role to play in diversified and resilient farming systems. Here it is, for those of you who are not his “friends.”
Nibbles: GRISP video, Savory management, Herbarium digitization, Fancy NASA map, Range photos, Fancy phenotyping, Ghana research, African food, Neotropical tree book, Epigenetics of nutrition, Liberian veg seed, Wheat belly, Germany & India
- The future of rice science. It says here.
- Is Holistic Management the SRI of livestock?
- Another online botanical database to contend with. Eventually.
- NASA maps poleward vegetation shift. I suspect the Progressive Cattleman will be onto that in a flash. See what I did there?
- More fancy aerial science, this time at the service of phenotyping. And more of the same.
- Ghana’s agricultural research system deconstructed. Would have been nice to mention the genebank.
- African food, in Africa and America. And in audio.
- Propagating tropical trees for fun and profit.
- The epigenetics of maternal nutrition, courtesy of USDA.
- Liberians showered in seeds.
- Kim, are you listening? This one’s for you.
- IPK reaches out to India.
Brainfood: Flower microbiome, Salt screening, Sustainble fisheries, Pollinator interactions, Wild pollinators, Forest loss, Landraces, Fisheries collapse, Quinoa diversity, Potted plants, Wheat diversity, Goat diversity, Genomics of domestication
- Unexpected Diversity during Community Succession in the Apple Flower Microbiome. Could be important in disease management.
- Plant Tissue Culture: A Useful Measure for the Screening of Salt Tolerance in Plants. But lots of different ways to do it.
- Fisheries: Does catch reflect abundance? Some. But probably not enough. Here’s the industry spin. And the NY Times does a number on it.
- Plant-Pollinator Interactions over 120 Years: Loss of Species, Co-Occurrence and Function. Extinctions and phenological shifts have occurred, but the system has shown resilience. It is unlikely, however, to continue to do so.
- Wild Pollinators Enhance Fruit Set of Crops Regardless of Honey Bee Abundance. Don’t you sometimes wish titles left something to the imagination? NPR breaks it down for ya, but doesn’t add much to the title.
- Continental estimates of forest cover and forest cover changes in the dry ecosystems of Africa between 1990 and 2000. About 20 Mha of forest loss, not 34 Mha. Still too much, though. But how did FAO get it so wrong?
- Robustness and Strategies of Adaptation among Farmer Varieties of African Rice (Oryza glaberrima) and Asian Rice (Oryza sativa) across West Africa. Local varieties can scale out. And should be used in breeding.
- Genetic and life-history changes associated with fisheries-induced population collapse. Phenotypic changes during Eurasian perch Baltic Sea fisheries collapse could be evolution, but when you look at the genetics it looks more like immigration of unadapted interlopers. Which might be bad for recovery.
- Variable activation of immune response by quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) prolamins in celiac disease. Quinoa may be gluten-free, but it can still give you grief, and some varieties are far worse than others.
- Social exchange and vegetative propagation: An untold story of British potted plants. It’s artificial selection, Jim, but not as we know it.
- Wheat Cultivar Performance and Stability between No-Till and Conventional Tillage Systems in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Tested 21 cultivars for performance under late-planted no-till system and — guess what? — performance varied.
- Genetic diversity and structure in Asian native goat analyzed by newly developed SNP markers. They originated in W Asia, and then admixtured (admixed?) in the E to different extents. Yeah, I thought we knew that already too, but scientists gotta make a living.
- A Bountiful Harvest: Genomic Insights into Crop Domestication Phenotypes. The mutations that underpinned domestication came in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Like this one in maize, for example.
The unlikely origin of Venere
An Italian walks into a genebank… No, not the beginning of a tasteless joke. But still rather a funny story, so bear with me. The genebank is that of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and the Italian visitor naturally starts discussing Italian rice with the (non-Italian) genebank manager. In particular, he tells him about this strange black rice they have in Italy, great tasting and great for the health, an old traditional Italian variety, dating back to time immemorial. Venere, it is called. Does the IRRI genebank, the largest rice genebank in the world after all, perhaps have it?
So the IRRI genebank manager, who likes that sort of challenge, does a bit of googling, and a bit of trawling of the various databases at his command. And what should he discover, but that the old traditional Italian variety actually traces back to a donation made by IRRI 22 years back. Yes, records agree that in 1991 IRRI sent a sample of a black rice from Indonesia (IRGC 17863, local name “Ketan Gubat”), collected in 1972 in a place called Yogyakarta, to W.X. Ren at the Italian seed company Sardo Piemontese Sementi. Venere is a descendant of Ketan Gubat.
Helping develop a new market in speciality rice has not traditionally been counted among IRRI’s impacts. There’s a first time for everything, I suppose. But there’s a bigger point here. How do you monitor this kind of impact pathway in a systematic way? Continuously chase literature on the use of all the hundreds of accessions a genebank sends out? Unlikely. 2 No, what you really need is a curious visitor who knows a particular variety walking into your genebank.