Nuts for makapuno

The redoutable Coconut Google Group has a great story from Roland Bourdeix about the Philippines’ makapuno coconut variety, ((Now, you may have to join the Google Group to read Roland’s post. But that would be no bad thing.)) drawing from an article in the Philippine Star. Makapuno nuts have a delicious and very valuable jelly instead of water, but can’t germinate. A makapuno palm will only have 15-20% or so makapuno fruits. The only way to get makapuno nuts is to plant a normal coconut from a palm with makapuno fruits and harvest that precious 15-20%. But that meets only 3% of demand. So in the 1960s Dr Emerita de Guzman came up with a way of rescuing makapuno embryos in tissue culture. When she planted the resulting seedlings, all the coconuts were makapuno. There are now nine labs in the Philippines churning out makapuno seedlings, but they’re expensive and few farmers can afford to buy them. I’ll let Roland tell the rest of the story, but here’s a little spoiler to whet your appetite: tissue culture makapuno palms were planted on a kind of artificial island in Thailand and something wonderful happened there…

Mutant teff

Sometimes a crop just doesn’t have the genes for it, as a good friend of mine who dabbled in taro breeding used to say. So then you have to try something else. “Zerihun Tadele is using the latest biotechnological methods to produce dwarf tef lines in order to prevent lodging, which causes significant yield losses.” The technique involved is TILLING (Targeting Induced Local Lesions IN Genomes), an automated methods for inducing, and then detecting, potentially useful point mutations. But is there really no short(ish) teff variety among the 4743 accessions in the genebank of Ethiopia’s Institute of Biodiversity Conservation? By the way, IBC has just won the Sultan Qaboos Environmental Preservation Prize. Congratulations!

Reinventing the wheel

More evidence of multiple independent domestication events. Previous work has shown such a pattern for rice in Asia and cucurbits in the America. Now it’s the turn of barley in Eurasia. A paper just out ((Saisho, Daisuke, Purugganan, Michael. (2007) Molecular phylogeography of domesticated barley traces expansion of agriculture in the Old World. Genetics.)) looked at both sequences of 5 genes and also morphological traits in a geographically widespread set of 250-odd landraces. ((From a Japanese university genebank.))

The results suggest that the crop was first domesticated 10,000 years ago somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, from whence it spread to Europe, North Africa and Ethiopia (the material from Ethiopia was somewhat distinct, as has already been documented). However, there was apparently also a second domestication, much later. It occurred in the region encompassing southern Central Asia, the eastern Iranian plataeau and the edge of the Indian subcontinent, and it is material from here that spread eastward starting maybe 2,500 years ago, possibly along the Silk Road, to give rise to the barleys of India, the Himalayas and China.

This is not an unusual pattern in Eurasian agricultural biodiversity. Sheep and cattle DNA data also show “two highly divergent lineages that distinguish European and Asian types, indicating a second independent evolution of these livestock species outside the Near East.” Not unusual, but somewhat puzzling. As the barley authors conclude:

It remains unclear why different cultures sought to re-invent these domesticated species several times rather than simply obtain them through diffusion from other farming societies.

The authors of the barley study speculate that the second domestication happened either because of the transmission of knowledge, or as an independent innovation. I find the second option a bit hard to take. Could it be that the results of the first domestication effort were just not adapted to conditions outside the Fertile Crescent, or there was a barrier to their diffusion? Or maybe it was just a matter of pride for the inhabitants of the Iranian plateau to have their own agrobiodiversity?