Man has in vitro plan for Iraqi dates.
The Breadfruit Story
That’s the title of just one of the sections of an exhibition of botanical watercolours, books and prints about the Caribbean called “Paradise in Print,” currently on at the New York Botanical Garden. The story it refers to, of course, is that of Captain Bligh, Fletcher Christian and the Bounty.
For an update on the story of the breadfruit’s global journey, go to VOA News. You’ll find an interview with — and a cooking demonstration by — my friend and world breadfruit expert Diane Ragone, director of the Breadfruit Institute at the National Tropical Botanical Gardens in Hawaii (both text and video).
The Breadfruit Institute maintains the world’s largest and most complete breadfruit germplasm collection. Diane has dedicated her life to the breadfruit, and in particular the idea that it can make a much greater contribution to the alleviation of hunger around the world. She and her research partners have been working on a tissue culture technique for the mass propagation and safe transfer of germplasm.
Identifying wheat proteins
There’s a new, better method for characterizing the proteins in wheat.
African biotech
SciDevNet’s roundup of agri-biotech in Africa is online.
Buffett sweet potato balls
Lets get this part out of the way: search Google for “Buffett sweet potato,” having seen an announcement at Papgren, and the number 3 link is for Buffett sweet potato balls. But that’s not what I was after.
I was after details of a US$3 million grant from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center to enhance sweet potato for Africa. The project has two aims: to boost resistance to a couple of diseases — sweet potato feathery mottle virus and sweet potato chlorotic stunt virus — and to improve the nutritional content of sweet potatoes, most notably by increasing folate, iron and zinc.
Excellent. Africa needs higher yields and more nutritious diets. I don’t know what approach the Danforth will take, but as they’ve teamed up with the Monsanto company it is possible that there will be some direct manipulation of DNA involved. Again, excellent, because sweet potato is generally reproduced by taking clones — cuttings, actually, often called slips — from parent material, so farmers should be able to distribute any material they receive. But, I wonder, just how many different varieties will the project engineer? And isn’t there a risk that this effort, particularly if it is successful, will blanket Africa with a few genetically similar varieties that do not have the diversity to withstand the next disease epidemic, making that, when it comes, all the more disastrous?
Rhetorical questions, I know, and ones that I’ve asked before. The funny part is, nobody else seems to be asking them. That Google search, in news? Precisely two items, and one of those is essentially the press release. The other is kinda fun.