Category: Biotechnology

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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 1 which followed fruit production in 140 Brazil nut trees over 5 years. 2 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 3 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 4 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.

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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.