- Fiat ghost paper. From bamboo.
- “If a cow burps, how do you measure it?“
- Recruiting drive: “I want you to continue to be my little ambassadors in your own home and your own communities.”
- “Insects and humans compete for food.” Say it isn’t so, Lubin Library.
A Star is Born
Dr Masaru Iwanaga used to run the CIAT genebank and has been deputy director general of Bioversity International and director general of CIMMYT. He is now director of the National Institute of Crop Science in Tsukuba, Japan. He’s had a lifelong committment to the use of agricultural biodiversity. He was recently interviewed for Japanese TV, and a preview of the result is online. (You can also download the full 28 minute video but you have to install stuff.) Alas, it is, of course, entirely in Japanese, but it seems to me that everybody enjoyed the experience tremendously. Just wish I could follow what’s going on. Can anyone help with a translation?
Watch BMGM_0526 in Animation | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
2nd International Conference on Landscape and Urban Horticulture
…took place in Bologna last week. The programme looks interesting. Anyone out there go? The abstracts will be on Acta Horticulturae in due course. Via.
Getting the aroma into rice
Researchers from Myanmar and Thailand have a paper in Field Crops Research 1 describing how they managed to get the prized gene for fragrance into a local rice variety which smelled, well, ordinary.
They started out with Manawthukha, a very well-liked but alas non-fragrant variety from Myanmar, and Basmati, which of course is the most famous of the fragrant rices, due to the badh2 allele. They did four cycles of back-crossing the latter with the former, always using progeny in which they could detect the DNA marker for the Basmati allele, and finally selfed the result. They then looked again for the tell-tale badh2 allele using molecular tools, hoping to find it in its homozygous state. Which they did, in 12 lines. Agronomic evaluation of these proved that they behaved essentially like Manawthukha, but were also nice and fragrant. QED. The authors say that the use of DNA markers to identify the gene for fragrancy right from the early cycles of selection considerably sped up the whole process of getting it into the Manawthukha genome.
Which sounds like a pretty good result. But I ran the paper past a rice expert of my acquaintance and he had an interesting question. Why did…
…Thai scientists collaborating with Myanmar choose to source the fragrance gene from Basmati, not from their own Khao Dawk Mali or other Thai aromatic varieties, nor from Myanmar’s own range of aromatic varieties? The alleles are identical in Basmati, Khao Dawk Mali and most of the Myanmar aromatics.
Any ideas?
But there’s more.
Some of the Myanmar aromatic varieties get their fragrance from a different gene, and one of them has twice the concentration of the main aromatic compound. Does that variety have both genes?
Good question. And no doubt there are people working on that. But I wonder whether other national programmes will be wanting to use that doubly fragrant Myanmar variety in their own efforts to have their own fragrant rice.
Nibbles: Wild sweet potatoes, Celiac, Chains, Medicinal tea, Salvia
- How to do interspecific crosses in Ipomoea.
- Proprietary blend of amaranth, buckwheat, teff, millet, quinoa, sorghum and cassava flour for gluten-free diets.
- Making food standards work for smallholders. Yeah, right.
- Rauvolfia vomitoria leaf tea good for diabetes. Bit worried about that epithet though.
- Mexican sage banned in another state. Pass the peyote then.