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.
Farmers know best?
A comment on a recent post suggested that one should “start with the assumption that farmers know what is in their best interest.” No doubt that is as true of Indian farmers as the rest of us, but unfortunately in many cases there are other pressures out there that mean that you can’t act on your perceived long-term self-interest, or indeed the information on which you can make that determination is not available or turns out to be faulty. As with the sweetleaf item that started this, we don’t know the full story, so we should be careful not to jump to conclusions, but an article in today’s Hindu newspaper describes a decision by farmers that seems to have gone wrong. Agricultural biodiversity, and its associated knowledge, is an important reason – maybe the most important reason – why unfortunate decisions don’t always result in catastrophe.
Another silver bullet?
The discovery of an enzyme which sits at a crucial step on the metabolic journey from glucose to that important anti-oxidant, vitamin C, opens the way for the kind of silver bullet thinking we have previously been somewhat critical of on this blog. Or it may not. We’ll see.
One of the researchers says:
We now have two strategies to provide enhanced protection against oxidative damage: Stimulate the endogenous activity of the identified enzyme or engineer transgenic plants which overexpress the gene that encodes the enzyme.
But I wonder whether this discovery will also allow the rapid evaluation of cultivars for vitamin C content?