- Pearl millet is getting the hybrid treatment. And, loving it.
- Want to know what to grow in your garden? Yes, even pearl millet.
- Nice pics of Armenian landscapes, food and foodways. No pearl millet in sight.
- The latest monthly newsletter from The Botanist in the Kitchen does seeds. Pearl millet unavailable for comment.
- China is genotyping and phenotyping (almost) everything. Pearl millet feeling left out.
- If pearl millet fails, there is always pastoralism. No, wait…
Brainfood: Targets, Plant Treaty, Decolonization, Fonio germination, Recalcitrant seeds, Microbiome, Taro seed system
- Status and future of seed conservation of threatened plants in the post-2020 era. 21% of threatened plants are conserved in genebanks across 44 countries in Europe and western Asia. Not bad, but not good enough. I wonder how many of those 21% will be of interest to breeders?
- How the international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture can support effective germplasm exchange: four Colombian case studies. The Plant Treaty can really help a country’s genebanks and breeders drive agricultural development, given half a chance.
- Reconciliation or re-colonization? Critical perspectives on seed banking and colonialism. Indigenous communities need to be careful in collaborating with genebanks and breeders.
- Impacts of climate change on fonio millet: seed germination ecology and suitability modelling of an indigenous West African cereal. Climate change will screw up the germination of fonio in some places, so genebanks and breeders better get cracking.
- Euterpe edulis seed recalcitrance: difficult, yes, but not impossible to genebank. Tricky seed storage behaviour need not deter genebankers.
- Accelerated aging caused diversity and specificity loss in the bacterial communities of Brassica napus seedlings. Genebanks should be careful with their seed aging experiments, because they might screw up the seed microbiome.
- Understanding Biotic Constraints to Taro (Colocasia esculenta) Production in the Derived Savanna and Humid Forest Agroecosystems of Nigeria. Genebanks need seed systems though.
Nibbles: Middle East genebanks, American crabapples, Community seed banks, Indian banana genebank, Legume breeder spotlight, Agrobiodiversity tourism
- The Lebanese and Syrian genebanks in the news. For good reasons, for now at least.
- Wild American apples should be more in the news. And probably more in genebanks.
- Community seed banks could be good news in fragile states.
- Good news for India’s banana diversity. Yes, it now has a genebank!
- All those genebanks need breeders, like Mina Nešić.
- Genebanks are nice of course, but it’s even better news when the agrobiodiversity gets out and about.
Underselling breeding, and conservation
Crops with massive … importance, clear biological upside, and real demand for better genetics — but a system where breeding remains small, underfunded, and structurally difficult to scale.
What crops, you ask? “Opportunity crops,” perhaps? Fonio, say, or Bambara groundnut, or any number of African leafy vegetables.
Those would have been good guesses, but actually I cheated, so no. The word hidden by the ellipsis is actually “economic,” and the quote comes from a Reddit post on coffee breeding. 1
That of course makes the observation even more amazing. As the Reddit poster goes on to point out:
We’ve built a ~$100B global industry that depends on plant genetics… while seemingly allocating only a negligible fraction of that value to actually improving those genetics.
And, I would add, allocating an even more negligible fraction to conserving those genetics (despite the fact that there’s a pretty solid strategy for how to do that). Which goes for opportunity crops too, come to think of it.
Rare today, relevant tomorrow: new lessons from a really old barley experiment
I was vaguely aware of the Composite Cross II (CCII) long-term experiment with barley, not least because of a Brainfood entry a couple of years ago. But I didn’t know a whole lot about it, so when a link to a recent thesis by Jill Marzolino at UC Riverside referencing it popped up in my feeds, I decided to look into it a bit more.
Harry Harlan and Mary Martini set up the experiment way back in 1929, in an effort to come up with barley varieties better adapted to the Californian environment. They started out with 28 diverse barley varieties from all over the world, made all possible crosses among them (though in only one direction), bulked together all the seeds they got, and planted a random sample of the mixture at Davis, California. The next year, they harvested the resulting crop, and sowed a sample of the seeds they obtained again in the same place.
And so on, for decades. Researchers following in the footsteps of Harlan and Martini planted 5,000-20,000 seeds year after year and left them to it, for 58 generations, saving a sample of the harvest along the way. This is called a composite cross population, or sometimes a composite hybrid mixture. When used in crop improvement, the process is sometimes referred to as evolutionary plant breeding, and has been proposed as a useful strategy for adapting crops to climate change.
Anyway, in the days of DNA sequencing, you can also see how CCII is an incredible resource for just trying to figure out how — and how fast — evolution works.
The paper I referenced in Brainfood in 2024 did just that. In Natural selection drives emergent genetic homogeneity in a century-scale experiment with barley, the authors showed that natural selection pretty quickly and drastically narrowed the genetic diversity of the original diverse population, affecting especially genes regulating the timing of flowering and reproduction. That basically allowed the plants to avoid drought. Yield also doubled, though that was less than plant breeders were able to achieve over the same period.
The thesis that caught my eye today is entitled Uncovering the Genetic Basis of Local Adaptation With Long-Term Evolution Experiments in Barley, and comes from the same lab. Dr Marzolino also looked at flowering time, but the chapter that really struck me was the one on “genetic rescue.” She found that when she planted the CCII at a different site, in Bozeman, some genetic variants that had been incredibly rare at Davis suddenly exploded in frequency. In her words:
This result indicates that very rare maladapted types persist in the CCII. It is not clear how they are maintained, but perhaps fluctuating environmental conditions from year to year alter the fitness of these types enough for them to persist… It remains unclear how long these rare types can be maintained in a population. Maintenance of rare types could be critical for the longer term survival of many plant species in a changing world.
Something for genebank managers to ponder. The normal practice is to regenerate genebank accessions under environmental conditions which are as close to ideal for the particular germplasm in question as possible, in order to ensure a good harvest of high quality seeds. But this result suggests it might actually be worth considering occasionally subjecting sub-samples to a few regeneration cycles in a contrasting environment. Might that not rescue some interesting — not to mention useful — genes?