Author: Luigi Guarino

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West African food composition data by variety

Good news from FAO:

West African Food Composition Table / Table de composition des aliments d’Afrique de l’Ouest is available on the INFOODS website (http://www.fao.org/infoods/tables_africa_en.stm and http://www.fao.org/infoods/tables_africa_fr.stm) as PDF and Excel file. It includes 472 foods and 28 components.

Particularly good because data is provided for different, named varieties, for at least some crops. Here’s a screengrab of part of some of the entries for pearl millet, just to give you an idea:

And yes, in case you were wondering, those ikmv and ikmp numbers refer to genebank accessions, as it happens mainly at ICRISAT and USDA. Just insert “ikmp” in the little box at the top right hand corner of Genesys, for example.

Now, who’s going to send these data to USDA and ICRISAT for them to include in their databases? Wait a minute… Why is everybody looking at me?

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Where do Pallay Poncho and Puka Lliclla come from?

Late blight resistant potato varieties don’t just come from Hungary, for use in Europe. They’re also increasingly important back in potato’s homeland, Peru. The CGIAR Consortium had a short story a couple of days back about Pallay Poncho and Puka Lliclla, two late blight resistant clones that CIP has been developing in collaboration with 200 Andean families in an area where an outbreak in 2003 devastated the harvest, the first time that has happened at such high altitude. But hopefully now the last, at least for a while, because of these new varieties. I wanted to know if material from countries other than Peru was involved in this work, but a glitch in CIP’s online database doesn’t make it easy to check that. Although you do get a pedigree for each variety, when you click on the ancestors you mainly get an error, which just means that particular clone is not conserved. You’d have to search for the family from which that clone came to trace back the full ancestry of each variety (by cutting off the digits after the decimal point in the accession number), which would be interesting to do, no doubt, but too laborious for me just now in my fragile, jetlagged state. Maybe the CIP informatics unit will look into it? I’ll let you know if they do.

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Nibbles: Farmer Assisted Natural Regeneration, Fungal apocalypse, Fertilizer platitudes, Sahel Restoration, Forest Restoration, Innovation, Phosphate bioavailability, Katniss, Ecoagriculture, Intensification

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A glass vial of beans is worth a thousand database entries

Check out one of the illustrations in Brainpicking’s review of a recent book on the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (“which stands today as the oldest natural history museum in the Western Hemisphere,” and just celebrated its 200th anniversary). It’s the one labelled “Agricultural seed samples collected by Charles F. Kuenne, 1948,” towards the bottom of the page. I’m trying to find out who Mr Kuenne was. Or is. He’s not mentioned in GRIN, alas. But what I wanted to talk about was the sort of glass jars that he — and many others — used to store and display his seeds.

I always thought they were pretty useless, as you can virtually guarantee that the seeds will be dead in short order stored like that. Of course keeping them alive was not the point, and you can now extract DNA from much worse samples. But the fact of the matter is it that during last week’s trip to the CIAT genebank I saw bean breeders look at the assembled ranks of little grain-filled vials on display there so longingly, and lovingly, I cannot but revise my opinion.

Bean breeders discuss the CIAT collection.

Who needs fancy databases when you can just run your eyes past thousands of different bean samples in a few seconds? Having said that, if you search the CIAT database you will find the varieties Red Valentine (G07707) and Rust Proof Golden Wax (G09523) collected by Kuenne — though not his actual samples, of course. They’re in Philadelphia.