Author: Luigi Guarino

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Aid Tree Aid

A BBC story alerted me yesterday to the existence of Tree Aid:

TREE AID was established as a charity in 1987 by a group of foresters in response to the famine in Africa, brought to public attention by Band Aid and Live Aid.

They wanted to provide a long term solution once the emergency relief efforts ended. They believed that trees could significantly reduce the vulnerability of communities in rural Africa’s drylands to drought and famine in the future.

Our current strategy expands on the original concept, focusing on forest management and income, food and medicines from trees.

I like their Cake Taste initiative, and their Tree of the Month feature. Seems very worthy. And it’s easy to donate online, should you feel so inclined.

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The pedigree of tolerance to submergence in rice

You may remember a post a few days ago about submergence-tolerant rice. Our friends at IRRI have been kind enough to explain to me where the gene in question — sub1 — came from.

I hope I get this right. It seems the immediate parent for IR64-sub1 was from the cross IR49830, which in turn came from the cross IR22385, made in 1978. The source of the gene at the time was a line called FR13A, which was derived from a germplasm accession called IRGC 8887. That was acquired by IRRI in 1963 from India, but with no further passport data.

If you want to get an impression of the complexity of the pedigrees of modern varieties, below is the one for IR64-sub1, with IRGC 8887 highlighted in yellow, thanks to the pedigree visualization tool that IRRI has been developing (click to enlarge).

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It’s a great illustration of the reason for the Multilateral System of access and benefit sharing being put in place by the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. In a bilateral system, such as the one envisaged by the Convention on Biological Diversity, how would you work out the contribution of IRGC 8887 — or indeed any of the other germplasm involved in the pedigree — to the overall success or otherwise of the final product?

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Featured: Wheat domestication

J. Giles Waines clarifies wheat domestication:

“World wide wheat species” do not descend from einkorn wheat Triticum monococcum (AmAm), first cultivated close by Gobekli. The source of the AuAu genome in BBAuAu tetraploid and BBAuAuDD hexaploid wheats is a wild diploid species, Triticum urartu, that was never cultivated as far as we know, nor domesticated. It does grow in the vicinity of Urfa, Turkey, and is more drought tolerant than einkorn. The source of the BB genome that provided the egg of the initial hybrid, and hence the extra genes for mitochondria and chloroplasts is thought to be an ancestor of present day Aegilops speltoides, which also grows near Urfa and Harran.