Category: Biotechnology

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Vitamin C mystery solved, again

I blogged three months ago now about what was touted at the time as the final elucidation of the metabolic pathway by which plants make vitamin C. The piece in EurekAlert! which I quoted says:

UCLA and Dartmouth scientists have identified a crucial enzyme in plant vitamin C synthesis, which could lead to enhanced crops. The discovery now makes clear the entire 10-step process by which plants convert glucose into vitamin C, an important antioxidant in nature… It was not until 1998 that a biosynthetic pathway was proposed to explain how plants make this compound. Research confirmed much of the pathway, although one crucial missing link continued to baffle scientists and remained unknown until this new research.

So imagine my surprise when I read this today in FreshPlaza:

Agricultural scientists say they have uncovered the last big secret of vitamin C in plants, and it will create the chance to naturally breed healthier fruits. The breakthrough in understanding just how plants manufacture vitamin C will enable state science company Hortresearch to identify DNA markers for individual plants naturally producing high levels of the vitamin… Hortresearch’s science general manager, Dr Bruce Campbell said the team had isolated the last undiscovered enzyme and proved it controlled vitamin C in plants. The enzyme was the last step in a chain of research begun overseas nearly 80 years ago by scientist seeking to understand how plants produce vitamin C.

The research comes from New Zealand rather than the US, and was carried out on wild and cultivated kiwi fruit species with contrasting levels of vitamin C, rather than on Arabidopsis, but otherwise sounds as if it was aimed at solving pretty much the same problem. No way to tell from these brief summaries of the two pieces of work whether they came up with the same answer, though. That will take some more digging.

Anyway, it does seem likely that gene-jockeys will be falling over themselves all too soon trying to engineer a higher vitamin C apple, marula or whatever. Good luck to them. I’m no Luddite. But our friend Ola does have a point in his comment on my recent post on potatoes. Would it not maybe be easier and more cost effective to try to get people to eat foods which are naturally high in vitamin C?

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Genotyping Support Service

The CGIAR’s Generation Challenge Programme‘s mission is

To use advanced genomics science and plant genetic diversity to overcome complex agricultural bottlenecks that condemn millions of the world’s neediest people to a future of poverty and hunger

They’ve just announced a new service: the Genotyping Support Service. What will GSS do?

Here’s a sample of what our latest service offers: assessing proposals, hiring genotyping services from the best providers, taking care of the administrative hassles, ensuring the generation of high-quality data and training participating researchers to interpret and work with the data to optimise outputs. In this way, researchers get to use the technology right away, while also learning how to get the greatest mileage out of the technology, thus creating local capacity. As such, GSS contributes to GCP’s effort to support and motivate plant breeding ‘champions’ in developing regions.

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More doom and gloom for agricultural research

I ((This article was sent in by Danny Hunter.)) was encouraged to read a couple of interesting news stories on SciDevNet highlighting useful efforts to improve scientific capacity in developing countries, only to be disheartened by another article identifying important gaps and weaknesses in many Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) in this very area. PRSPs are the multi-year plans that developing countries now have to draw up and adopt as a pre-condition of support from funding agencies such as the World Bank. Not good news for agricultural research and researchers in these countries.

The article highlights a warning for the world’s poorest nations to place more emphasis on using scientific knowledge and technological innovation if they wish to escape growing unemployment and poverty. The warning is contained in a major report — “The Least Developed Countries Report 2007: Knowledge, Technology Learning and Innovation for Development” — published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

The PRSPs seek to reduce poverty through sustained economic growth, but fail to give importance to the role of scientific and technological change in achieving sustainable development. No wonder national budgets and donor aid for science, technology and innovation in general, and for agricultural research and extension and capacity-building in particular, are dwindling. ((“…although agriculture remains the principal source of livelihood in LDCs, spending on agricultural research has fallen from 1.2 per cent of agricultural gross national product in the late 1980s to less than 0.5 per cent today.”)) While there are no easy solutions to this complex problem, the report does highlight strategies for donors and LDCs that can improve capacity for science, technology and innovation,

from encouraging “technological learning” in both “farms and firms”, to making better use of international legislation on intellectual property rights, and encouraging donors to increase support for what it describes as “knowledge aid”.

However, while it is important to make such high-minded pronouncements, let us not forget that individual scientists carrying out research in LCDs have much to offer on a day-to-day basis in terms of enhancing national scientific capacity. Such capacity-enhancing activities might involve providing training and mentoring to young scientists, helping young scientists and scientific groups to form networks, ensuring young local scientists are acknowledged and included as co-authors on scientific publications, and so forth. I am sure there are other, more innovative approaches to capacity-enhancing that have been used by scientists working in the field of agricultural biodiveristy. If so, I would love to learn about them.

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Down memory lane

I suppose if you blog long enough eventually you’ll end up re-visiting old stories. That happened quite a lot today.

First, there was a post I wrote a few months back about how mesquite — a useful source of food and other products in some places — is proving a nuisance in northern Kenya. Well, according to a story out today in the East African Standard, the government has been taken to court over the introduction of the plant, but is shifting the blame to FAO.

Then, you may recall a couple of posts about Brazil nuts and more generally nuts in Brazil. Today I ran across a paper ((Karen A. Kainer, Lucia H.O. Wadt and Christina L. Staudhammer. Explaining variation in Brazil nut fruit production. Forest Ecology and Management, 2007.)) which followed fruit production in 140 Brazil nut trees over 5 years. ((Clicking where it says map below this post will take you to where the Brazilian researchers work: Rio Branco, Acre)) What struck me was that there was significant variation in fruit production from year to year for individual trees, but that some trees are consistently high producers. I don’t know if there’s a Brazil nut improvement programme, but if there is it should definitely know about those! There are also management practices that are likely to increase production, such as cutting lianas and adding P.

Third, an editorial and article in Nature about the use of systems biology ((“The study of the interactions between proteins, genes, metabolites and components of cells or organisms”)) to evaluate traditional Chinese medicines reminded me that I’d written on that subject too. What is fascinating about Chinese traditional medicine is that it is based on diversity: it doesn’t deal in single chemicals taken singly, but rather in often incredibly complex combinations of a myriad plant and other products. A particular species will often play quite different roles in different formulae aimed at different symptoms.

Finally, I mentioned about a month back a piece of work ((Eric Giraud et al. Legume Symbioses: Absence of Nod Genes in Photosynthetic Bradyrhizobia. Science, 2007)) on an often overlooked but very important subset of agricultural biodiversity — microsymbionts. A longish article yesterday in EurekaAlert on the same work (I don’t know why the delay) made me realize I had been excessively cursory at the time of my original post. The researchers have identified a totally new genetic mechanism controlling the way nodulation happens, which opens up the possibility of interesting agricultural applications.

One of the things this little flurry of retrospection has done is alert me to the fact that some of the links in older posts may now be broken, for example because after a certain period of time the piece gets put into an archive behind a paywall. Not sure what we can do about that, though.

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Orchid to be exploited

Remember the recent post about ylang ylang? Timbuktu Chronicles sent me to an oldish article from South Africa’s Mail & Guardian which lists the tree among Madagascar’s fragrant exports. But the article is really about a rare and threatened Malagasy orchid and how it will be cultivated for the French perfume industry. I hope everyone has their ABS arrangements down tight.