The 25th anniversary special issue of the Indian Journal of Plant Genetic Resources (IJPGR) is available by permission from the Bioversity International website. Though this is subject to some restrictions on re-use, it is nevertheless pretty cool.
Talking tomato Today
Dr Sandra Knapp of the Botany Department of the Natural History Museum in London was interviewed by the BBC’s Today Programme this morning about the tomato genome, which of course has been all over the news lately. You can hear her 54:20 minutes in, or, if that doesn’t work, here. Particularly cool that she squeezes in a mention of the wild relative that was also sequenced.
Sonalika searching
A blog post from CIMMYT presented a welcome opportunity to play around with a range of online information resources on wheat varieties, despite the fact that some of the links are broken.
So let’s say I want to find out about a particular variety. Sonalika, for example. I heard about it as being an important older Indian variety, and want to find out more: a pedigree, maybe some performance data, maybe even get some seed. First, I headed on over to the IWIS-Bib database, which “is a supplement to the International Wheat Information System. Each record in IWIS-Bib identifies a publication, and each publication describes a cultivar.” For Sonalika, that returns the citations of 11 references. Good start, though I do now have to get hold of the publications themselves. Maybe in the future I’ll be able to download a PDF, or there will be a link to Google Scholar, or whatever.
Let’s move on. I was not able to find a way of getting performance data for Sonalika from IWIS proper, though I was at the time pretty sure I’d be able to order seed of it from CIMMYT. But, having thought that, I then checked, and Sonalika does not feature in a Genesys search as being conserved at CIMMYT, although you get hits from various other genebanks, including USDA. And there’s plenty of characterization and evaluation data there. I may be doing CIMMYT a disservice here, though. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, but certainly there was no way of getting easily from a bibliographic hit on a particular variety to evaluation data on it. Which it would be nice to be able to do.
Moving on again, I then headed over to the Genetic Resources Information and Analytical System for Wheat and Triticale (GRIS), the main subject of the blog post I mentioned at the beginning. Entering Sonalika in the little search box gave me a whole lot of very cool stuff. Like a pedigree: II-53-388/ANDES//(SIB)PITIC-62/3/LERMA-ROJO-64. Which you might like to compare with the one on GRIN: II53-388/Andes//Pitic 62 sib/3/Lerma Rojo 64. Reassuringly similar. And accession numbers; which interestingly do not include CIMMYT. So it does look like I wouldn’t be able to get Sonalika from them after all. You also get summary evaluation data and even recommendations for use, which is very handy. And a pedigree diagram, which is, however, frustratingly impossible to export.
So, overall, a not uninteresting though ultimately somewhat disappointing experience, mainly because of the necessity of hopping between websites. But maybe those linkages will come now that a bunch of the people concerned have had a meeting, as described in the post that started all this. Fingers crossed.
Nibbles: Coconut origins, Microbe genebank, Stay-green barley, Sachs may suck, Cap in hand, Wheat information, IITA birthday, Cat art, Poppy biosynthesis, Correcting names
- Coconut origins, the quick version.
- Chile gets a bugbank.
- Stay-green barley genes located. In a genebank collection, natch. What now, a Stay-green Revolution?
- New Economist blog agnostic about Millennium Villages.
- Plant scientists call for $100 billion investment in, er, plant science.
- Wheat pedigrees online.
- IITA a youthful 45.
- Cats in Islam.
- Noscapine production in poppies is complex, but not so complex that boffins can’t figure it out.
- Want help in getting taxonomic names right? What you need is the Taxonomic Name Resolution Service. Does that mean we don’t need this any more?
The Food Programme and some of its meta-narratives
I’ve been catching up on the BBC’s Food Programme by way of its handy podcasts, and, amid a certain amount of fare that, it must be said, can perhaps most charitably be described as filling, there have been some undoubted gourmet morsels. 1 I was particularly struck by how, for chocolate, beer and gin (and others, for all I know), the past few years have seen an explosion of small manufacturers and tiny niche products, especially in the US. That famous Long Tail at work, I guess. The other common thread is an increase in consumption of such relative luxury goods in the developing world. Quite a combination, but what’s not clear to me is the kind of dent the financial crisis has put into these trends. Nor, of rather more direct interest, do I know the exact geographic location where one might expect to benefit maximally from them. But I suspect the masher-uppers are working on that.