Author: Luigi Guarino

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China establishes (another) national genebank

China established its first national gene bank on Friday in south China’s city of Shenzhen with the support of the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), officials said. With the establishment of the National Gene Bank in Shenzhen, China will be able to better protect, research and utilize its precious genetic resources, boosting the genetics industry and safeguarding the country’s genetic information, said Qi Chengyuan, head of the high-tech industry department of the National Development and Reform Committee (NDRC).

Eh? What does that make CAAS’s National Crop Gene Bank? And the genebank at the Kunming Institute of Botany, China’s largest, apparently? What are they? Chopped liver? 1

Genebank bubble indeed.

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Collecting to restore

We blogged recently about the huge fire in Arizona and what it may be doing to crop wild relatives. In southern California, however, they’re doing something more than just wringing their hands with worry. They’re going out and collecting seeds, that could later be used for restoration, as part of a project called Seeds of Success.

Once back at Rancho Santa Ana, the team dries the seeds in their paper bags, boxes them up and sends them to the national Bend Seed Extractory in Bend, Ore. There they are sorted and X-rayed to see whether they are viable, and then scientists go to work trying to find out how to get them to germinate.
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Part of each seed lot is stored at the U.S. National Seed Bank as an insurance policy against future threats such as climate change, and some go to native plant researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The trove also is shared with the Kew Millennium Seed Bank operated by the Royal Botanic Garden in England, which aims to save 25 percent of the world’s plant species by 2020.

In some mountain areas, they’ll really have to hurry.

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Mujib Nature Reserve has interesting plants too

So the Mujib Nature Reserve, “Jordan’s jewel of eco-tourism,” is poised to be promoted to UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. There have been ethnopharmacological studies of the flora of the site, which has even been used to “test models to improve the conservation of medicinal and herbal plants and the livelihood of rural communities through the management, and sustainable use of medicinal and herbal (M/H) plants for human and livestock needs.” And the flora baseline survey for the reserve is listed in Jordan’s monitoring system for implementation of the Global Plan of Action on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture as being part of the country’s efforts to “promote in situ conservation of crop wild relatives.” Wonderful. But I got all that by googling. Why is not more made of the plants on the page devoted to the reserve on the website of Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, along with the Long-legged Buzzard and the Eurasian Badger? And yes, that’s a rhetorical question.

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The diversity of Andean diversity festivals

Hot on the heels of the Fifth Potato Festival in Peru, which we mentioned a few days ago, comes the Festival Nacional de la Agrobiodiversidad Frutos de la Tierra, also in Peru, 24-26 June. And, not to be outdone, Ecuador weighs in with the I Seminario Internacional de la Papa, also on 24 June. One has to wonder what is driving this proliferation of agricultural events in the region. And since we’re on the subject of Andean diversity, does anyone else think that some of the potato varieties illustrated by National Geographic are nothing of the sort?