A couple of very different stories about drought resistance in the media today. The first one describes – albeit very briefly – how Italian breeders have come up with a new tomato variety that needs about a quarter of the water of thirstier types. It’s not clear from the article, but I got the impression genetic modification was involved, which would be odd as some wild tomato species are found in deserts! So I did a bit of snooping on the website of ENEA, the institute where the research was done, and I found a press release from a few days back which suggests (in Italian) that perhaps it was not genetic transformation but rather functional genomics that was involved. The second piece tells us how a combination of experimental and observational work by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientists in Panama is suggesting that even in the humid tropics it is drought which is limiting the distribution of many species. As climate change is expected to manifest itself primarily though shifts in rainfall patterns in the tropics, this means that dramatic changes are likely in the composition of plant communities in Central America.
Fidel lashes out … again
While he may have been too ill to attend the Mayday parade in Havana, for only the third time since 1959, Cuban leader Fidel Castro has found the strength to pen yet another diatribe against the current craze for turning food into fuel. His reflections on the sugar harvest are fascinating, but I wonder whether he will have any impact on the rest of the world. And what would he have made of the latest advance: a genetically engineered sorghum, modified to yield better in the long growing seasons of Texas and Kansas.
Pinchbeck potatoes
Here we go again. Potatoes, naturally low in carotenoids, the precursors of vitamin A, have been genetically engineered to make them richer, to the point where 250 grams of fresh potatoes might supply half the recommended daily allowance.
Pinchbeck is a “cheap or tawdry” imitation of gold.
Dogs That Changed The World
Controlling self-pollination
Not a day passes, it seems, without news of yet another important gene being identified and mapped. Not long after geneticists uncovered the trigger for flowering, we now have news that researchers at Cornell are close to tracking down the genes that regulate a plant’s ability to self-pollinate. Good news for breeders everywhere.