- Improvement in wild endangered Persian sturgeon, Acipenser persicus (Borodin, 1897) semen cryopreservation by 2-hydroxypropyl-beta-cyclodextrin (HβCD). Hey, stop sniggering, it’s good to know there’s an ex situ option.
- Biofortification of wheat grain with iron and zinc: integrating novel genomic resources and knowledge from model crops. Your jetpack is here, sir.
- Genetic Diversity and Ecological Niche Modelling of Wild Barley: Refugia, Large-Scale Post-LGM Range Expansion and Limited Mid-Future Climate Threats? As ever, the answer is yes.
- Economic and physical determinants of the global distributions of crop pests and pathogens. More crops, more pests, but not as many as there would be if more money were available for observation.
- Wild potato species (Solanum section Petota Solanaceae) in the Tunari National Park, Andean Region of Cochabamba, Bolivia. Four species, but not very morphologically variable.
- Impact of Genetic Drift on Access and Benefit Sharing Under the Nagoya Protocol: The Case of the Meishan Pig. Current Meishan pigs in the US have become differentiated from the ones originally imported from China in the 1980s.
- Investment into the future of microbial resources: culture collection funding models and BRC business plans for biological resource centres. Services must include capacity building and the promotion of links to research collections and users. That can’t be done on basis of full cost recovery from sales. Will need a combination of government, commercial and project support. Can crop collections learn anything from this?
- Gene Discovery and Molecular Marker Development, Based on High-Throughput Transcript Sequencing of Paspalum dilatatum Poir. Important forage grown in apomictic monoculture now has genomic resources that should allow better breeding. And perhaps some diversification.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of the Major Peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) Cultivars Grown in China by SSR Markers. The northern cultivars are different to the southern.
Nibbles: Foley Heinz award, C4 rice history, Fish feeding Africa, Sustainable harvesting, Sorghum death, Carver, Improving crops, Commodity production
- Jonathan Foley, @GlobalEcoGuy, lands well deserved award for his straight-talking on food issues.
- I wonder what he’d say about C4 rice.
- Not sure he’s ever written about fish, but he probably will.
- Sustainable harvesting of Prunus africana maybe not so sustainable after all. Well, I guess that’s science.
- Encomium to the recently-deceased “Father of Sorghum.”
- Shame he missed the round-up on improving abiotic stress tolerance in crops, linked to by AoB Blog.
- Wouldn’t it have been cool if the Father of Sorghum had met the Peanut Man?
- Global production of 10 top commodities has increased 130% since 1960, population by 89%. Draw your own conclusions about world hunger and malnutrition.
Nibbles: Plant Guardians, Peruvian Solanum, Sunflower genomics, California drought, Brazil drought, Sri Lankan tea, Minnesota wine, Seed of Hope, Sugarcane engineering, King Cotton, Rubber boom
- Do you want to be a Plant Guardian?
- Some people are already getting busy guarding Solanum in Peru.
- The sunflower family gets a molecular makeover.
- What the California drought means for food.
- And the one in Brazil for coffee.
- And tea in Sri Lanka is also in trouble, though for once drought is not to blame.
- Minnesota has a wine industry thanks to wild relatives. But I won’t hold that against them.
- In today’s Seeds of X story, X=hope and the place is Aceh.
- If sugarcane was a cold-tolerant oil-producing crop, would it still be sugarcane?
- Cotton has a lot to answer for. Or rather, the people who grew it do. Or did. Oh crap.
- Rubber too. Though not as much. I guess. Oh crap.
Nibbles: CGIAR priorities, Drought tolerant rice, Agroecology bibliography, Amaranthus seed production video, Ethiopian genebank, Yemeni genebank
- UN Special Rapporteur on food thinks “questions of the 60s are not the questions of today.” Does he think the CGIAR is answering the questions of the 60s? One suspects so, but surely there are points of agreement, e.g. nutrition, food systems, natural resources management…
- Farmers would be willing to pay quite a premium for drought tolerant (DT) rice hybrids, but for DT varieties not so much. That’s an opportunity for public-private partnerships. Or is that a 60s answer to a 60s question?
- Mr de Schutter probably knows all about this bibliography of agroecology in action. Which all seems so much more 60s than hybrid rice somehow.
- How 60s is it to want to produce decent amaranthus seed? It’s totally unfair, but I can’t resist linking to this now.
- Ethiopian genebank, set up in response to the genetic erosion of the 60s, gets nice, long writeup in The Guardian by way of introduction to a bare-bones couple of final paragraphs on some G8 poverty reduction plan. Nice video though.
- There was no Facebook in the 60s for genebanks to strut their stuff on.
Credit where credit is due
You may have been following the reaction to the media frenzy about the announcement yesterday of a new way of making potatoes resistant to blight, cause of the Irish Famine a century and a half ago. I won’t add to the confusion, beyond saying that, as in everything in life, there are always alternatives, and wouldn’t it be nice if we gave them all a fair go?
No, what I want to talk about here is where the gene in question came from, the gene for blight resistance that was inserted into the popular British variety Desiree to such apparently good effect. We know from the paper that the gene is called Rpi-vnt1.1 and that it came from the potato wild relative Solanum venturii, but that’s all. I think that’s insufficient. There may be a reference in the paper or the supplementary material ((Jonathan D. G. Jones et al. (2014). Elevating crop disease resistance with cloned genes. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0087)) to the source of the Solanum venturii germplasm that was used in this work, but I was unable to find it. Apologies to the authors if I missed it, and thanks to whoever it was at the Sainsbury Lab that tweeted a response to my request for information:
@AgroBioDiverse @Cipotato Seed was from: http://t.co/XLC5Ud82mh
— The Sainsbury Laboratory (@TheSainsburyLab) February 17, 2014
It turns out that the germplasm was obtained from the Centre for Genetic Resources, the Netherlands, which has often been mentioned on this blog. Most recently, as coincidence would have it, yesterday, and on the subject of potatoes to boot. CGN is at the very forefront of genebank documentation, so it was very easy to find that there are 3 accessions of the species in question at CGN, that only one of those is resistant to blight, that it is CGN18000, that it was collected in 1972 in Argentina at an elevation of 3200m and that it came to CGN via the Institut fur Pflanzenbau und Pflanzenzuchtung Bundesforschungsanstalt, Braunschweig, Germany. There are more accessions out there (although apparently not at CIP, the International Potato Center, at least according to Genesys), and also herbarium specimens. Enough in fact to come up with an estimate of the overall geographic distribution of S. venturii, and perhaps identify some gaps.
Or am I wrong? It’s an informed guess. If there had been more than one accession with resistance, it would have been difficult to know which one was actually used in the paper. Anyway, I look forward to the day when even the authors of whizz-bang biotech papers will spend five minutes to do what I just did and properly acknowledge, perhaps even link to, the genebank, and the specific accession, whose existence ultimately allowed them to do their work.