- GBIF makes its move.
- Homaging the seed.
- Learning sustainability from old Amazonian farmers. Really old. Really, really old.
- Yet another Aussie genebank. Or maybe the same one, I’ve lost track. And interest.
- Where climate data comes from.
- Maine’s fiber community, what, exposed? Unveiled? Uncovered? And similar from Bolivia.
- REDD+ will save us all.
- Don’t crack open the mead to celebrate the solution to colony collapse disorder just yet.
- All things Capsicum on one handy website.
- Whole bunch of policy briefs on African seed systems. Don’t know if I’ll ever have the time to read through the lot, but cursory perusal suggests the following bottom line: the market can’t do it all by itself.
Multidisciplinary taro book on the way
The National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka has just announced the publication of what promises to be a fascinating book on taro:
M. Spriggs, D. Addison and P. J. Matthews (eds) (2012) Irrigated Taro (Colocasia esculenta) in the Indo-Pacific: Biological, Social and Historical Perspectives (Senri Ethnological Studies 78). Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. 363 pp., with index.
According to one of the authors, “[t]his map from the preface shows main geographical coverage (areas 1 – 10) of the volume (there is also some extension to China and mainland SE Asia).”
All the chapters will soon be available on the Museum’s website, so keep a lookout.
Nibbles: Anna Laurent, Sequencing, Gossypium, Capsicum, Native Americans, Journal, Genebank, Hairy fruit, JIC, Tasty tulips
- Design guru talks botany. Latest plant getting the treatment is the Hawaiian Cotton Tree. Which, despite its name, really is a (remote) cotton wild relative.
- What has Next Generation Sequencing ever done for me? And what you should know about how it works.
- And here’s an example of it at work: different cultivated cotton species have behaved differently, genetically speaking.
- That used ancient DNA, this one didn’t, but I guess a future one on chiles might. LATER: Ooops, just realized this is old. So what was it doing in my RSS feed?
- Speaking of chiles, here’s a couple of more things on Native American agriculture.
- Free access to the first issue of volume 20 of Journal for Nature Conservation for the next 12 months.
- Rebuilding the genebank in Ivory Coast.
- Discovering the wonders of the coconut. Their headline, not mine.
- The latest news from the John Innes Centre’s genebank.
- Fancy a tulip? To eat, that is.
The backstory to finding sodium exclusion genes in wheat
Attentive readers may remember a piece we Nibbled a couple of weeks back about salinity tolerance genes (Nax1 and Nax2) making their way from a the wild relative T. monococcum to durum wheat. I asked around and it turned out that the monococcum cross in question was originally made decades ago, so I thought there might be an interesting backstory there. Some quick research quickly led me to this: “Parental material used in crossing and in Na+ uptake and flux experiments were durum wheat (Triticum turgidum) Line 149 and cv Tamaroi, and the parents of Line 149, Triticum monococcum C68-101 and durum cv Marrocos. Seeds were provided by Dr. Ray Hare of the Tamworth Agricultural Institute, New South Wales Department of Primary Industries.” So I contacted Dr Hare, who is now retired, and he was kind enough to send me the following, and allow me to reproduce it. It illustrates not just the importance of genebanks and crop wild relatives, but also how that importance sometimes becomes apparent through luck coupled with perseverance. Interestingly, that combination can be patented. My main question to Dr Hare was where the T. monococcum accession that started it all came from.
The C68-101 Triticum monococcum accession I believe came from the University of Sydney’s collection. It is known to carry the stem rust resistance Sr21. It is the stem rust resistance gene present in the Stakman differential set, ‘Einkorn’. Dr Dante The, a post graduate student at Sydney University, had been given the task to transfer Sr21 to hexaploid wheat so that this gene could be used in breeding rust resistant breadwheat cultivars.
Originally this accession was used as a source of Sr21, transferred from the diploid through a bridging cross (interspecific) with Marrocos (stem rust susceptible durum) to the hexaploid level. The Line 149 a stable tetraploid line carrying Sr21 (i.e. C68-101/Marrocos). It has the Australian Winter Cereal Collection (AWCC) accession number AUS 17045. This line is freely available. I am sure Greg Grimes and team, at the AWCC, will provide you with seed.
Now what has all this got to do with the salinity research, you may ask. To cut a long story short, I selected this tetraploid accession because I felt that it represented a potential divergence from the normal tetraploid genetic diversity, in that I was certain that it had a considerable content of monococcum genes. I was endeavouring to assemble a relatively small collection of tetraploid accessions (subspecies) representing the broadest range of genetic diversity from the Australian Winter Cereal Collection. At this time I was keen to look at the range of phenotypic expression for a number of breeding traits in durum wheat. I was concerned that the breeding program could be running out of genetic variability.
Being the Australian National durum breeder at the this time, my varieties were being grown on soils that we knew to contain transient salinity. Durum wheat yields were relatively poor on these soils. Durum wheat was known to be sensitive to elevated sodium levels in the soil.
My long time friend, Rana Munns, is a plant physiologist and an expert in plant/salinity research. She had all the experiment techniques sorted out nicely. So we got together and started a small project to see if there was any salt tolerance in durum.
All reports in the press were not positive. But nevertheless we pushed on. Our starting point was my collection of tetraploid subspecies. To our pleasant surprise, we found a few lines that appeared to exclude sodium from the leaves. Confirmation experiments showed that we were really onto something (i.e. high potassium and low sodium in leaf tissues, the reverse of normal when grown in elevated sodium media; this was a highly significant and repeatable reversal).
As the Marrocos line was rather wild and far from an ideal cultivar type, I commenced crossing it to my durum breeding materials. The cross with my variety ‘Tamaroi’ formed the research population for inheritance studies and subsequent molecular research. All these studies are published. Search under R. A. Munns.
I have no idea where the monococcum accession came from originally. I could check out the register of the Sydney University collection when I am at the Plant Breeding Institute, soon. I am on the staff of the PBI. I can also check Dante’s thesis when next at PBI Cobbitty. Dante’s thesis may carry more details on the source of the monococcum.
A bit long winded but I think that it is a nice little story on the value of genetic resources centres. Outcomes like this clearly demonstrate the value of such centres, many times over. A colleague of mine (Richard James in Plant Industry, CSIRO, Canberra) is transferring the two sodium exclusion genes (Nax1 and Nax2) to hexaploid wheat. Who knows what other genes for important traits can be found in monococcums and other progenitors. There are so many possibilities and exciting opportunities for gene exploration without going outside the Triticeae.
Brainfood: Dietary diversity, Diversity and diseases, Soil IK, Insect symbionts, Rhizobia, Wild lettuce, Tree genetic erosion, Pre-domestication barley, Strampelli
- Relating dietary diversity and food variety scores to vegetable production and socio-economic status of women in rural Tanzania. Dietary diversity was all too often alarmingly low, and when it was it was associated with seasonal fluctuations in the production and collecting of vegetables. But a more varied diet need not necessarily be healthier, so more procedural sophistication will be necessary in follow-up studies.
- A risk-minimizing argument for traditional crop varietal diversity use to reduce pest and disease damage in agricultural ecosystems of Uganda. For Musa and beans, more varietal diversity meant less damage and less variation in damage.
- Exploring farmers’ local knowledge and perceptions of soil fertility and management in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. Soils which farmers described as being more fertile were, ahem, more fertile.
- Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Important because they can confer protection from natural enemies, among other things. They behave a bit, but not entirely, like beneficial nuclear mutations.
- Widespread fitness alignment in the legume–rhizobium symbiosis. There are no cheaters.
- Genetic polymorphism in Lactuca aculeata populations and occurrence of natural putative hybrids between L. aculeata and L. serriola. Not much diversity in Israel, surprisingly. But isozymes?
- Meta-Analysis of Susceptibility of Woody Plants to Loss of Genetic Diversity through Habitat Fragmentation. The standard story — that trees suffer less genetic erosion because they are long-lived — is apparently wrong, even for wind pollinated trees.
- Large-scale cereal processing before domestication during the tenth millennium cal BC in northern Syria. “This was a community dedicated to the systematic production of food from wild cereals.”
- Nazareno Strampelli, the ‘Prophet’ of the green revolution. Before Norman, there was Nazareno.
- The memory remains: application of historical DNA for scaling biodiversity loss. Historical collections of salmon scales reveal many connections between modern evolutionary significant units (ESUs) in the Columbia River and old ones; but also, intriguingly, some differences.