Author: Luigi Guarino

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Protecting the potato one variety at the time

FreshInfo has just published a little piece saying that a foundation has been set up to save potato varieties in perpetuity. Alas, the announcement is behind a registration wall, but it is really too important to keep hidden like that, so I’m reproducing it in full below. There is no link on the article, and nothing on the CIP website or Facebook page. Very strange. You heard it here first.

A new international foundation is being set up to protect potato varieties in perpetuity and is appealing for individuals and companies to show their support and become Heroes for Life.

The Roots for Life Foundation has been several years in the making and launches officially on 1 October. It is the brainchild of chairman and Lincolnshire potato grower Jim Godfrey, working with Dr Pamela K Anderson who heads up the International Potato Centre (known internationally as CIP) in Peru, Canadian grower Peter van der Zaag and Edinburgh bio-technology entrepreneur Simon Best.

CIP holds an in-trust collection of more than 4,000 native potato varieties in its gene bank and Roots for Life hopes to mark this year’s International Year of Biodiversity with its fundraising campaign to protect them.

Godfrey said: “In the genetic biodiversity of these native potatoes lie the answers to food security in a world where climate change, water and land shortages, and an energy crisis threaten global food security. The CIP gene bank is a trust fund for our survival.”

Roots for Life is appealing for Heroes for Life to each donate $5,000 and protect one of the varieties. This will raise some $21 million – less than the amount US consumers spend on French fries each day.

The website will go live on 1 October and the foundation hopes to announce all the heroes in Svalbard, Norway, home of the Global Seed Vault.

“A Wall of Heroes will be built at the gene bank in Lima bearing the names of the individuals, groups and institutions who have stepped up to this challenge for the benefit of future generations,” said Godfrey.

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Nibbles: Dingo, In vitro, Human diseases, Aphandra natalia, Cave fish, Pets, Pavlovsk, Elderberry, Urban ag, Chilies

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Pavlovsk must go to the ball!

Fred Pearce, “one of Britain’s finest science writers” according to Wikipedia, justified that assessment with what was really quite a good piece on Pavlovsk yesterday. Unlike others, he got everything pretty much right. Well, almost everything. Pavlovsk is not, of course, a seed bank, as the title of the piece suggests, but that mistake is probably down to a subeditor at The Guardian. Particularly impressive was how he tracked down an old report from a USDA germplasm scientist who visited the place in 1975. 1 I’ll leave you with a nice quote:

Crop diversity has always been the Cinderella of conservation, even though the hundreds of thousands of crop varieties bred by farmers and scientists over several millennia represent a hugely important resource.

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Nibbles: European plant conservation, Homegardens, Anthropogenic vegetation, Soil Association, Wheat and heat, Coconut meet, Pavlovsk beatdown, Plant species numbers, Vegetation and climate change, Genebank software

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Getting the most out of wild tomatoes

ResearchBlogging.orgWhere should breeders look for traits like drought resistance among the landraces and wild relatives of crops? The FIGS crowd says: in dry places, of course. And they have a point. But it may not be as simple as that, as a recent paper on wild tomatoes shows. 2

The authors looked at the diversity of two genes implicated in drought tolerance, nucleotide by nucleotide, in three populations of each of two closely related wild tomato species from the arid coastal areas of central Peru to northern Chile. Annual precipitation at the collecting sites ranged from 5 to 235 mm. As another recent paper put it, the tomato genepool “has both the requisite genetic tools and ecological diversity to address the genetics of drought responses, both for plant breeding and evolutionary perspectives.” Here’s where the populations came from: 1-3 are Solanum peruvianum, 4-6 are S. chilense.

These places are pretty dry. Here’s what a close-up of the driest (number 3) looks like:

Anyway, Hui Xia et al. found evidence of purifying or stabilizing selection at one gene, called LeNCED1. So far so good. But they also found a pattern of variation at the other gene, pLC30-15, in one of the populations (number 4, S. chilense from Quicacha in southern Peru) which they interpreted as evidence of diversifying selection, where “two alleles compete against each other in the fixation process.”

Now, that would arguably be a more interesting population for a breeder to investigate than any of the others, but the observation “is difficult to explain based on the environmental variables of the populations investigated.” Ouch, say the FIGS crowd! 3 But is it perhaps that the authors just considered average rainfall, and not how variable rainfall was at the site, from year to year? The best they can suggest by way of explanation is that S. chilense is an endemic with a very narrow ecological amplitude. In contrast, S. peruvianum is more of a generalist, with larger, expanding populations, found in both dry and mesic locations: “this may not be favourable for the occurrence of adaptive evolution, either because phenotypic plasticity can be promoted rather than local adaptation or because beneficial mutations are more likely recruited from the higher genetic standing variation.”

So, target dry areas for adaptation to drought tolerance, by all means, but the environment is not all, and some wild species may be more useful than others in providing interesting diversity depending on their ecological strategies and population dynamics.