- New Agriculturist is out. Among many cool things, check out the piece on crossing rice with a wild relative to make it perennial.
- Nestle finds 33 elite coffee trees in Indonesia, evaluates 6, will use these to produce seedlings by somatic embryogenesis. What could possibly go wrong?
Livestock genetics symposium online
DAD-Net informs us that the presentations given at the symposium on Statistical Genetics of Livestock for the Post-Genomic Era, held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, on May 4-6, 2009, are now available online in the form of both PDFs and videos. Quite a resource.
Nibbles: Kerr reports, Monsanto shares, Thailand patents
- Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture mourns loss of agricultural biodiversity, issues report.
- Monsanto “shares with farmers the science behind the technology.” Nice of them.
- Thailand patents (transgenic) jasmine rice to “keep foreigners out of our paddy fields.” So much to say about this, so little time.
India clones the buffalo, solves the milk problem
There was a wonderfully informative article on buffalo cloning in Northern Voices Online — tag line: “Connecting Indians Globally” — a few days back. Here’s a few of the interesting tidbits that it serves up (though I haven’t yet verified the information, I should add). A buffalo has been cloned in India for the second time, this one by the name of Garima. The first survived only a few days. India is the world’s largest milk producer (15% of total global production); 55% of that is contributed by buffalo. India’s first cross-bred cow, named Jill, was produced in 1909 at the Imperial Institute of Animal Husbandry Bangalore, by crossing an Ayrshire with the local Haryana breed. And so on.
Now, in such a well-informed and data-laden article, it is surprising not to hear the other side of the story as well. Why not say something about the importance of conserving, continuing to use, and improving local breeds, while all this cross-breeding and cloning is going on? Why not mention the work of the National Bureau of Animal Genetic Resources? After all, it will be a long time before cloned elite buffaloes are contributing to that 55%.
Nibbles: Sheep size, Insect populations, Tuna, Forest regeneration, Buffalo in India
- Climate change shrinking sheep, exploding insect populations.
- Japanese boffins sequencing tuna genome, planning super-tuna. Godzilla unavailable for comment.
- Birds eat beetles which eat seeds. So no birds, no forest. Such is the wonderful web of life.
- Buffalo cloning and its future. But what is that guy in the picture doing?