Author: Luigi Guarino

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Some faba beans, without the nice Chianti

ResearchBlogging.orgIf you’re a faba bean breeder interested in cold tolerance you will have come across a paper recently in GRACE the title of which will have set your pulse racing: Screening and selection of faba beans (Vicia faba L.) for cold tolerance and comparison to wild relatives. 1 And if you had skimmed ahead to the conclusion you would have found it difficult to contain your excitement.

In conclusion, some faba bean accessions were selected for cold tolerance and desirable agronomic characteristics. ACV-42, ACV-84 and ACV-88 were selected as highly cold tolerant. These sources of cold tolerance could be used to improve cold tolerance level in faba bean breeding programs.

You would then have gone back and read the paper thoroughly to find more information on these previous accessions, and in particular on where to get hold of them. But you would have been disappointed, and you might very well have moved dejectedly onto the next paper in your Google alert.

Fortunately I am made of sterner stuff. So, thanks to an email to the authors, I can now tell you that

ACV-42 = TR 31590 at the Aegean Agricultural Research Institute, Izmir, Turkey
ACV-84 = IG 14048 at ICARDA
ACV-88 = IG 72247 also at ICARDA

And, thanks to Genesys, I can add that IG 14048 is a Polish landrace called Debek and IG 72247 is from Canada and has at some point had the number “73 Rm 70”, though I can find no reference to this in GRIN-Canada. Neither Eurisco nor Genesys has the Turkish genebank’s faba bean data, and their website was down when I tried it today, so I can’t tell you anything about TR 31590, I’m afraid.

You’re welcome.

And here’s a bit of a bonus for you. The paper also drops the fact that

The best known freezing tolerant genotype is a French genotype ‘Cote d’Or’ which can survive –22ºC if previously hardened…

Well, being a faba bean breeder interested in cold tolerance you probably already know that, and have it, but in case you’ve run out or something, Genesys/Eurisco says you can get it in a couple of different genebanks, including CGN in the Netherlands. 2

Now, to feed back that evaluation information on ACV 42, 84 and 88 — and indeed all the other hundred-odd accessions evaluated in the paper — to the genebanks from whence they came, to make life that little bit easier for the next faba bean breeder interested in cold tolerance breeder…

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Nibbles: In situ CWR project gong, IRRI genebank kudos, Seed Savers interview, Hairloom spuds TV, Rice and salinity, Korean wild seeds

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Mapping crop wild relatives in Guatemala

Good news for lovers of Mesoamerican crop wild relatives. Ten years in the making, the Atlas of Guatemalan Crop Wild Relatives (Atlas Guatemalteco de Parientes Silvestres de las Plantas Cultivadas) is finally out. 3

The Atlas provides detailed information on 105 species or subspecies of wild Guatemalan plants that are related to crops, including their description, distribution, diversity and conservation status. The species are organized into genepools corresponding to the 29 crops that were chosen for this study because of their economic, cultural and biological importance. Through an interactive Google Earth® interface, users of the Atlas can consult individual maps for each of the 105 plants included in the study, showing their known distribution based on the locations where scientific specimens were collected and projections of their potential range based on climate. Additional maps display areas of high species richness and diversity to assist conservation efforts. The maps draw upon a database of 2,600 records of scientific specimens conserved in numerous national and international institutions, primarily herbaria and seed banks.

I’ve been playing around with it and it is pretty easy to use. Once you open the database in Google Earth 4 you can map the actual and potential distributions of individual species within each of the genepools, and also of the genepool as a whole. This, for example, is what you get for Phaseolus.

The green-to-red colouring shows the geographic distribution of species richness within the genus. One could quibble on aesthetic grounds about the choice of icon in this case, but that can always be changed by fiddling with the properties of the appropriate layer in Google Earth. More important is that the potential distributions and richness maps are clipped to the borders of Guatemala. I can understand the logic for that, an unwillingness to extrapolate, but I would perhaps have taken the risk, if only to stimulate neighbouring countries to embark on similar efforts.

The Atlas also allows you to look at the distribution of specimens and species richness in the dataset as a whole, and helpfully provides a layer on the protected areas of Guatemala. So this is all the specimens that the authors looked at, mapped together with the extents of national parks, archaeological sites and the like.

Just a little more fiddling with the properties of the layers allows you to see to what extent areas high in richness of crop wild relative species can be found within the confines of protected areas. The answer? Not much.

I don’t know enough about the flora of the region to be sure whether all the relevant species have been included, but the coverage looks pretty comprehensive to me. Clicking on the specimen icons gives you useful basic metadata. In some cases, the specimens are distinguished as to whether they are from herbaria and/or genebanks. So in this case the red dots are germplasm and the rings herbarium specimens of Phaseolus coccineus, which allows a rudimentary form of gap analysis, I suppose.

Perhaps more effort could have been expended in this direction. For example, are there really no wild Guatemalan cacao accessions conserved in genebanks around the world? And could not a little widget have been concocted to very roughly delimit gappy-looking areas? But that is to quibble, and no doubt both data and functionality could be added in the future. An English translation certainly will be. This will prove a marvellous conservation resource. Congratulations to the authors. 5 Now, guys, what about Paraguay?

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Brainfood: Wild lentils, Palms, Iron, Soybean

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The strange silence of the CGIAR on CBSD

Good to see CABI reacting to a slew of recent press reports on Cassava Brown Streak Disease in East Africa with a blog post summarizing what they and others have been doing about that very worrying problem lately. Interesting also that the best they can do as far as linking to what the CGIAR is doing is an IITA story from 2010, though they do nick IITA’s photo. I couldn’t find any reaction from the CGIAR on the CBSD story, which is surprising because the FAO press release which seems to have sparked the whole thing off does mention new IITA varieties that could help solve the problem. The best the CG seems to have been able to produce is a tweet and a blog post referring to a rapid multiplication technique which quoted an IITA video from 2009. Relevant, yes, but neither the tweet nor the post refers to the FAO story. Why is the CG not getting involved in this discussion more actively? What am I missing?