Author: Luigi Guarino

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The great Gatsby teaching resource

The Gatsby Charitable Foundation, which funds plant science research in the UK, established Gatsby Plants as a National Teaching Facility for Plant Sciences 4 years ago. The project has received continued funding until 2011.

Gatsby Plants aims to enthuse undergraduate students to study plant science further through two initiatives which expose them to the exciting developments in plant science and the scientists leading this research. These are:

  • an annual Summer School for high-achieving 1st year undergraduate students from UK Universities
  • a Teaching Resource providing plant science lecturers with access to novel and inspiring teaching material

Very worthy. I’ve been having a look at the teaching materials in particular. You need to register to get access.

The majority of materials have been kindly contributed by members of the plant science research community (see Terms of Use for how to credit their efforts). Gatsby Plants has also negotiated access to material from some commercial organisations and is actively involved in generating novel content.

There’s a number of lectures with definite agrobiodiversity interest, for example one by Prof. Peter Beyer, University of Freiburg, Germany on “Golden Rice on a Mission” and another from Dr Peter Craufurd on “Crop Science for Development: A Journey from the Laboratory to Farmers’ Fields in the Tropics.” And another: Prof. Monique Simmonds of Kew entitled “Plants in our Lives: from Beauty to Death.” You get a video of the lecturer delivering the talk, with accompanying slides. If you want your students to view the lecture you contact Gatsby Plants and they send you a username and password which allows access to a URL.

You also get practicals (there’s one on pea genetics), images and movies.

I would imagine they could be very useful to trainers, although I must say it would have been nice to be able to also download the presentation and adapt it to one’s particular situation and audience. Anyone out there with training resources on agricultural biodiversity to share? How about on CWRs, for example?

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Rokupr rotting away

An opinion piece in the Awareness Times of Sierra Leone decries the current parlous state of Rokupr Agricultural Research Station. It starts, however, by waxing lyrical abut the past.

Established about half a century and decade ago, the Rokupr Rice Research Station was a darling vision of the early colonialists who among other considerations were fascinated by the fertile ecologies and enviable terrain of the Scarcies coastline… With rice as a popular diet in West Africa and around the world, Sierra Leone in the shadows of Rokupr Rice Research was put on the spot light of fame and popularity. Rokupr became internationally known.

Indeed. And not only for rice breeding, but also for being at the forefront of the scientific thinking about on-farm conservation of plant genetic resources in the 1990’s, as part of the Community Biodiversity Development and Conservation Project. Alas,…

…[t]he present condition of Rokupr Rice Research is dismal. The one time elegant roads in the station premises are presently all gorges and death traps. The compound remains uncared for. Trees, shrubs and grass have overgrown and form a canopy over the compound. The trees are dens for giant snakes and other poisonous pests. Research trial fields are abandoned. There are no resident senior staffs and research activities have been suspended for ages. The compound looks marooned and deserted. The aura of research is dilapidated. Laboratories and staff quarters are ransacked and in dear need of renovation. Staff morale, dedication, and motivation are low and devoid of promise.

A pity, especially since an alumnus of the station was minister of agriculture until fairly recently. Who will save Rokupr?

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Nibbles: Taxonomy, Herbs, Animal domestication, Bio-char, Videos, French fries, Barcoding

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A date with wild dates

A friend is going to Crete for his holidays, so I naturally suggested that he visit the populations of the wild relative of the date palm, Phoenix theophrasti, which is rare, endangered and sort-of endemic to the island. Actually there are apparently some populations in southern Turkey too, but I didn’t know that at the time. Ok, but where exactly do I find it, he asked? Give me lat/longs.

Well, I’m not sure if I managed that, but after a certain amount of googling I happened across what seems to be the mother lode of P. theophrasti information. And all conveniently packaged in a pdf pamphlet. It’s been produced as part of an intriguing project called “CRETAPLANT: A Pilot Network of Plant Micro-Reserves in Western Crete.” Great that one of the plants/habitats being targeted is a crop wild relative. Coincidentally, the genome of the crop itself has just been sequenced.

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A.B. Chapman Lectures in Animal Breeding and Genetics

I’m informed by DAD-Net that the A.B. Chapman Lectures in Animal Breeding and Genetics have been presented annually at the University of Wisconsis-Madison since 1994 by leading international scholars in the genetic improvement of animals, and that this year’s lectures were given by Prof. Miguel Angel Toro, Departamento de Produccion Animal, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain, on May 4 and 5. Prof. Toro gave two talks, on “Principles of Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources” and on “Mating Allocation in Genomic Selection.” Did anyone out there see them, in particular the first, either in person or live on the internet? Let us know. In any case, it looks like they’ll eventually be available for downloading.