Author: Luigi Guarino

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Looking for a (double) grain in a seedbank

Thanks to Mike Jackson for taking up the challenge of finding more examples of double-grained rice. He got in touch with friends at his old stomping grounds in the IRRI genebank, and the indispensable Ms Flora de Guzman there, who heads of that genebank past and present will I’m sure forgive me for saying actually runs the place, 1 came up with a variety from Nepal called Laila Majnu. This was sent to IRRI in 1981, and is conserved in the genebank as accession IRGC 59101 (and incidentally safety duplicated at Svalbard). The fact that IRGC 59101 (which is pictured below, thanks to Ms de Guzman again) is a bit of a strange morphological variant isn’t mentioned in the genebank database, however. Not the electronic version, anyway. Ms de Guzman simply remembered the variety and dove back into her notebooks to find it. Next time I think about venturing into Genebank Database Hell, I want her as my guide…

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Nibbles: Programme evaluation, Slash-and-burn, Goat accents, Share herbaria, ITPGRFA communications, Fish talk, Archaeobrewing

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Double grained rice finally out in the open

A small group of farmers in Bangladesh were secretly and sacredly nurturing in field the unique rice variety (or species!) that has two (sometime three) grains in a rice seed. It has not been so far noticed that this type of rice exists in any other country of the world.

That’s from Krisoks’ Blog over at Eldis Communities. Where you can also see photos. 2 Has anyone seen this elsewhere?

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Collecting Missions Repository gets an upgrade

I don’t want to get a reputation as a curmudgeonly old coot 3, so let me grasp an opportunity that has fallen into my lap to trumpet a small but significant improvement in conditions down in Genebank Database Hell.

I have on occasion noted that if you wanted to share a link to one of the historical collecting mission reports catalogued in the Collecting Missions Repository, you wouldn’t be able to. No permalink, see? You had to provide the code number of the collecting mission and leave your interlocutor to do the rest, as we did in a recent post on wild Brassica, for example.

No longer. I have been informed, and have verified the fact, that each report now has a handy permalink, reachable from the metadata page.

Let me be the first to congratulate the developers. Would that the folks at Climate Analogues were so obliging…