Are crop wild relatives (CWR) more trouble than they’re worth? There are certainly significant challenges involved in including them in breeding programmes, but you’d have thought that between the new molecular tools that are now out there, the greater numbers of CWR accessions in genebanks, and all the information about how useful CWRs can be, breeders would be falling over themselves to make those kinky inter-specific crosses. Well, according to a major review by our friends at Bioversity International (the outfit formerly known as the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute), the use of CWRs in breeding programmes has been steadily increasing in the past 20 years, but probably not as much as might have been expected. There’s been a number of papers recently on CWRs. This paper, also from Bioversity, looks at in situ conservation of CWR. Check out this for a discussion on the definition of the term, and, from some of the same people, there’s this overview of conservation and use of CWR, using a specific example. Here’s an example of conservation assessment and priority-setting for the wild relatives of the peanut. For a discussion of the possible effects of climate change on these species, see this.
Amazing maize stories
Apparently, maize recovered from ancient burials in NW Argentina is genetically “almost identical” (whatever that means!) to the landraces still being grown in the area. I wonder if it was prepared in the same way too. This piece in the Washington Post certainly shows that maize culinary traditions are strong, and can go back a long way.
Etruscan cattle
A new study tries to disentangle the mystery of the origin of the Etruscans by looking at the genetics of the cattle currently found in the area of central Italy which takes its name from that ancient civilization, Tuscany (or is it the other way around?). It turns out that, unlike cattle from other parts of Italy, cattle from the Etruscan lands shows genetic affinities with Anatolian breeds. According to the Italian researchers, the Etruscans came to Italy from Turkey, and they did so by sea. I wonder if it will be possible to recover DNA from the remains of ancient Etruscan cattle…
Breeding info
Getting the new issue of CropBiotech Update in my inbox today, and noticing at least a couple of crop improvement items I would like to blog about at some stage, prompted a reflection on sources of information on the use of agricultural biodiversity in breeding.
Produced by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA), you can get CropBiotech Update delivered by email once a week or check out the website here (where you can subscribe to an RSS feed or sign up for the email alerts). FAO also has a news service in biotechnology, which you can check out here. You can sign up for monthly email alerts, but I couldn’t see any RSS feeds, unfortunately.
Somewhat broader than either of these, but with some overlap, is Plant Breeding News, sponsored by FAO and Cornell University. You can sign up to the email alerts, consult the archives and learn how to contribute here. BIO-IPR is an irregular listserver produced by GRAIN. It focuses on PGR policy issues, and you can find out more about it here.
Finally, I just wanted to mention an example of a national-level agricultural research newsletter which provides information on breeding programmes, DIDINET News from the National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI) in Papua New Guinea. DIDINET stands for “Didiman/Didimeri Network” or a network for scientists and other stakeholders in the agriculture sector. There must be lots of other examples of such national newsletters. I wonder if someone has compiled a list.
And of course I haven’t mentioned the various ways the CGIAR Centres disseminate information about crop breeding, such as this one, for example. But maybe Jeremy will say something about that. He knows more about it than I do.
How to brew beer, Zimbabwe style
An excellent post on Field to Feast, a blog of “Africa-inspired writing, cooking and eating”, describes the process of making (and drinking) some of the local brews of Zimbabwe. “I don’t think I’ve heard of a grain or fruit that isn’t made into some sort of beer or liquor,” Carolyn, the author, writes. She goes on to describe brewing a batch of chikokiyana, a quick-fire beer made from maize. It does point up the human propensity to turn anything fermentable into an alcoholic beverage, even if it is something of an acquired taste. But it isn’t just home brewers who use a diversity of raw materials. Some big brewers have adopted a similar strategy.
Of late, my own web searches for articles about sorghum have been overwhelmed by news about a sorgum-based beer from brewing giant Anheuser-Busch. The beer, called Redbridge, is being touted as good for drinkers who are allergic to gluten. It also represents a deliberate attempt by the brewer to develop new niches for different drinkers, based on a diversity of raw materials, to boost sales and prevent swings in revenue. Sounds an awful lot like using several species and varieties in a farming system to increase production and stabilize yields.