Author: Luigi Guarino

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Are you a graduate student interested in organic plant breeding and seed systems?

This just in from Alex Lyon, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He She and some friends are planning a symposium for graduate students interested in plant breeding and seed systems for organic agriculture, and he she asked us to help get the word out. Happy to do so.

We are inviting applications from graduate students in plant breeding and related programs for the first Student Organic Seed Symposium. The event will be held at the Lakeview Inn in Greensboro, Vermont, from August 5 – August 8, 2012. Hosted by High Mowing Organic Seeds and organized by students from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, the Student Organic Seed Symposium aspires to build a community of graduate students interested in plant breeding and seed systems for organic agriculture.

For more information, please visit here.

Space is limited — Funding is available — Applications are due February 15, 2012!

We hope to see you in Vermont!

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New Plant Hardiness Zone Map ready for prime time

There’s a USDA media blitz on about the new Plant Hardiness Zone Map for the United States.

The 2012 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map is the standard by which gardeners and growers can determine which plants are most likely to thrive at a location. The map is based on the average annual minimum winter temperature, divided into 10-degree F zones.

You can read the paper. You can read the press coverage. And you can watch the video.

The good news for America’s 80 million gardeners is that for the first time the map is available in an online interactive version, and is a lot more accurate. The bad news is that things are getting hotter, and many of those gardeners are going to have to rethink their choices:

The new PHZM is generally one half-zone warmer than the previous PHZM throughout much of the United States, as a result of a more recent averaging period (1974–1986 vs. 1976–2005).

But then we knew that. As far as I can see, you can’t compare the new version with the old online, side by side kind of thing. That would be one powerful climate change advocacy tool, wouldn’t it. Gardeners don’t like to be messed with, in my experience.

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Featured: Kew ABS policy

Clare Trivedi reassures Dave Wood on Kew’s ABS policy:

I know it may be a little buried in the Kew website but we have a very well-established Policy on Access to Genetic Resources and Benefit Sharing which covers all aspects of acquisition, use and supply of plant material.

And to avoid you digging around for it, Dave, here it is.

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Online Biodiversity Heritage Library has agrobiodiversity too

Selected collections from the Biodiversity Heritage Library are now online and available through iTunesU. There’s some wonderful stuff. One thing of agrobiodiversity interest is “Wild Oxen, Sheep & Goats of All Lands, Living and Extinct”, by R. Ward, published in 1898. Below is one of the illustrations to whet your appetite.

And yes, we have blogged about Marco Polo sheep here, of course we have.

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Next-generation sequencing and genebanks: a teaser

We’re of course all holding our breath, are we not, over the imminent appearance of the American Journal of Botany Special Issue on what next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies mean for the plant sciences. A few teasers are already out on the journal’s website, and it looks like the papers will come out in piecemeal fashion over the next weeks, and months for all I know. The paper that’s most relevant to us here is perhaps that of Susan McCouch and others on NGS and genebanks. I saw an early version of it, but am not allowed to share it, so until it comes out officially, here’s a taster from the introduction to the volume as a whole by Ashley N. Egan, Jessica Schlueter and David M. Spooner. I trust the journal will consider it fair use and not come after us with their lawyers.

A total of 1750 national and international gene banks worldwide preserve ~7 million accessions of advanced cultivars, landraces, and wild species relatives of plants that the world depends on for food, fiber, and fuel (FAO, 2010 ). McCouch et al. (2012) present a vision for the potential of large-scale genotyping to help characterize, use, and manage gene bank collections, from their perspectives as scientists working with large-scale rice collections. Genebanks have many pressing challenges due to the large size of their collections and the need to characterize them properly for a wide variety of users. They also face legal constraints (and opportunities) imposed in today’s climate of ownership of genetic resources. The challenges include the need to correctly identify accessions, track seed lots, varieties, and alleles, identify and eliminate duplicate accessions, justify adding new accessions to the collection, identify a small subset of the collection that represents a majority of the variation in the entire collection (a “core collection”), identify geographic areas holding useful sets of diverse alleles, associate genotypes with phenotypes, and motivate innovative collaborations to place useful materials into the hands of plant breeders. McCouch et al. (2012) outline these challenges and show how NGS can vastly improve genetic characterization efforts in genebanks. Initial NGS projects with the rice collections include identification of SNPs and other polymorphisms (http://www.oryzasnp. org/; http://www.ricediversity.org/; http://www.ricesnp.org/) based on large-scale resequencing and genotyping projects.

Back with a full discussion (and a comparison with the paper on the same subject in a recent Brainfood) when the publication is online.