Author: Luigi Guarino

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A Green Revolution for trees

Prof Roger Leakey, sometime of ICRAF (among other places), where he pioneered tree domestication in support of rural livelihoods, and now Vice Chairman of the International Tree Foundation, has a fascinating new book in the offing.

In contrast to the doom and gloom often emanating from the tropics, ‘Living with the Trees of Life’ illustrates how many different aspects of agricultural science can be combined into a more robust approach to farming, which will be productive, as well as more environmentally and socially sustainable. This approach uses agroforestry as a delivery mechanism for multifunctional agriculture aimed at addressing the cycle of land degradation and social deprivation in the tropics. A key role in this is played by the ‘Trees of Life’, the large number of indigenous trees that produce marketable fruits, nuts, medicines and other products of day-to-day importance in the lives of local people throughout the tropics.

The book promises to be very practical.

A 3-step approach is described which can be used to close the Yield Gap (the difference between the yield potential of food crops and the yields actually achieved by farmers). This pays special attention to land husbandry and to the wise use of the natural resources which support agriculture and the livelihoods of poor farmers. By closing the Yield Gap agroforestry builds on the advances of the Green Revolution.

Builds on those advances while avoiding its pitfalls, and indeed rectifying its more regrettable consequences, one assumes.

Finally, all this comes together in a set of five ‘Convenient Truths’ which highlight that we have most of the knowledge and skills we need. This is illustrated by the Equator Prize winning project ‘Food for Progress’, in Cameroon, a project which has also been recognized by UK Government’s Office for Science as an African Success Story.

I had a little trouble identifying this project, but I believe I finally found it, and very interesting it sounds too.

Look out for the book in July, from CABI.

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How long does it really take to do mutation breeding?

Thanks to Nigel for pointing us towards the 24 January edition of the BBC radio programme Farming Today, which had a short segment on mutation breeding. It may not be online for long, and may not be available to all, so here’s a transcript of the relevant bit, which Nigel got from Defra.

Anna Hill: It’s been called a technological revolution which will change the way the world’s crops are grown. We find out how genetic mutation works later in the programme.
(Break)
AH: The UK is leading a revolution in the race to breed new plants as quickly as possible. Scientists at the Sainsbury laboratory in Norwich have developed a new technique which could help farmers in Japan where last year’s tsunami flooded land with sea water leaving such high salt levels that few crops could grow.
Well now the researchers have worked out a high speed way to identify the genes which are resistant to growing in salty soil to breed a new variety of rice within two years.
Dr Brande Wulff explained how important this is for the world’s crops.
Dr Brande Wulff (Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich): Well this is a huge leap forward. Traditionally it would have been a, a marathon of five years or so to do this type of work or possibly even a long distance endurance event of ten years or so. Now we’ve reduced that to a short sprint of one or two years. So it’s, time is in, is the essence in this type of work and so it’s really a huge leap forward.
AH: How does the process work?
BW: It’s extremely simple. In this case with rice you take your favourite cultivar of rice or variety of rice. You then mutate that. When you introduce mutations you introduce bad ones and good ones and that happens randomly and the challenge is then to take those good mutations and anchor them in your favourite variety and get rid of the bad ones. And that’s done by, by crossing the mutant plant back to the parental variety, the non mutated parent, and then in the progeny you select for the ones that have your desired trait. And so you, you can get rid of the bad mutations in this way.
And then you sequence those plants, you put on your DNA goggles which allows you to look at the sequence and then you pinpoint those mutations or genetic variants that confer the new trait that you’re interested in. So genetic variation takes, it, it’s occurring the whole time naturally, but what the scientist does, he speeds that up in the lab using a chemical mutagen or, or something like that.
AH: Which is not GM.
BW: It’s not GM in, in the sense that we’re, we’re not transforming the plant, we’re not introducing a novel DNA from outside of the plant.
AH: Now the work that’s being done at the moment is looking at salt resistance in rice because in Japan the tsunami contaminated soil with a lot of salt. So how long would it be do you think before Japanese farmers would actually see a new variety of rice to plant which is resistant?
BW: It’s perhaps only a matter of a year or so before they can clean up these plants and then bulk up enough seed so that they can distribute it to farmers.
AH: That’s very, very fast isn’t it?
BW: It is indeed, yes.
AH: So could this be applied to other plants then?
BW: Well really the sky is the limit. This technique requires that you have a good genome sequence of the plant that you’re working on, which we have for rice. We don’t have that yet for wheat, but we do have it for a lot of other crops including very important crops like soy bean, cassava, potato, grape, even oranges and, and apples have been sequenced.
AH: Dr Brande Wulff from the Sainsbury Lab and do join us again tomorrow.

Dr Wulff clearly has a way with words. I particularly liked his reference to DNA goggles. And he understands journalists. But I took the liberty of running said words by a friend of mine who used to work on mutation breeding at the IAEA. He was considerably less sanguine.

A healthy dose of skepticism, re. the timeframe of one or two years to get stable mutants — to be introduced into breeding programs — wouldn’t hurt. Salinity tolerance is a very complex multigenic trait; getting all the mutation events — and their interactions — to confer the desired level of tolerance is quite a tall order. The back crosses to clean out the unintended deleterious effects of induced mutations (breaking the linkage drags), even with MABC, takes time also.

One to keep an eye on.

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Genebanks forgotten, again

Bill Gates highlights his family Foundation’s work on cassava viruses in his latest letter. We have on occasion wondered here why the CGIAR didn’t make more of its work on that subject.

But anyway. I really wanted to rue a different lost opportunity here.

Historically, increasing the productivity of a crop meant finding two seed variants, each with some desirable and undesirable characteristics, and crossing them until you get a combination with mostly the good characteristics of the two parents. This required actually growing tens of thousands of plants to see how they develop in different growing conditions over time—for example, when water is plentiful and when it is not. Now the process is quite different. Imagine the analogy of a large public library with rooms full of books. We used to have to use the card catalogue and browse through the books to find the information we needed. Now we know the precise page that contains the piece of information we need. In the same way, we can find out precisely which plant contains what gene conferring a specific characteristic. This will make plant breeding happen at a much faster clip.

Would it have killed him to slip in some recognition of the genebanks where all those “books” are so painstakingly and expensively kept?