Category: Biotechnology

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A brave new world for crop wild relatives

Thanks to Dr Brian Ford-Lloyd of the University of Birminghan in the UK for the following contribution.

A ground breaking publication in Nature Genetics points to the future for the genetic evaluation of crop wild relative germplasm. A group of Chinese scientists have used Illumina Next Generation Resequencing to produce whole genome sequences of 17 wild species of soybean. Only 17 wild species? But this is just the start for evaluating crop wild relatives on a completely different level than before — adding a different perspective to the analysis of genetic diversity, the identification of important adaptive differences between species, and locating novel allelic variation that can be used in crop improvement. One important result from the work is that they uncovered genetic variation in the wild species that has been clearly lost in cultivated material.

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Biofortified’s take on the biofortification conference

Over at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, Jeremy has been critical of information coming out of the First Global Conference on Biofortification. He wonders if the organizers and attendees were/are too focused on a techno-fix rather than on diverse diets as a solution. This being a conference on biofortification, we talked about biofortification a lot, and it could be argued that biofortification is a techno-fix, whether by breeding or biotechnology.

Ah, but you just know there’s a “however” coming up, don’t you. Thanks to Anastasia for a great summary of the recent biofortification jamboree.