Breeding

April 4, 2017April 4, 2017

This is what’s threatening crops around the world

Readers with a long memory will remember the Global Crop Loss Survey, which we blogged about here back in November. Just to remind everyone else:

Over a period of three months (November 2016 – January 2017), 1142 responses from 216 respondents in 67 countries were recorded during the Global Crop Loss Survey organized by the Crop Loss Subject Matter Committee of the ISPP [International Congress of Plant Pathology]. This appears to be the first Survey of this kind ever conducted.

Well, some preliminary results are out.

At this stage, a key question concerns the overall representativeness of the information gathered. Across all five crops, experts have reported losses lower than 1% in 15.4% of the cases, between 1 and 5% in 37.3% of the cases, between 5 and 20% in 33.7% of the cases, between 20 and 60% in 11.5% of the cases, and higher than 60% in 2.1% of the cases. A simple aggregate weighted average of these losses, in which loss levels are weighted by their reported frequencies, gives an overall crop loss of 11.7%. This figure would represent the average loss caused by an average disease (or pest), (1) when occurring, and (2) in the absence of any other disease or pest. Although a preliminary result, the estimated average loss is well within the ranges of global or regional crop losses that have been reported in the literature.

The money table is this:

Would be interesting to compare these data with the investment being made in breeding against, and indeed in germplasm evaluation by genebanks for, different threats. Analysis is continuing…

April 3, 2017April 10, 2017

Brainfood: Banana identification, Donkey domestication, Mouse domestication, African cattle, Pig domestication, Biofuels, Biofortification, Genomics for breeding, Species movement, Crop diversity double, N fixation, Ag commercialization models, Wild beans, Brassica domestication, Teaching biodiversity

Molecular and cytological characterization of the global Musa germplasm collection provides insights into the treasure of banana diversity. 16% of 1500 accessions need taxonomic verification. Could have been much worse.
Why the Donkey Did Not Go South: Disease as a Constraint on the Spread of Equus asinus into Southern Africa. Gap in distribution between Kenya and southern Africa until colonial times probably down to trypanosomiasis.
Origins of house mice in ecological niches created by settled hunter-gatherers in the Levant 15,000 y ago. Hunter gatherers inadvertently domesticated the mouse.
The genome landscape of indigenous African cattle. Now we know where the genes for heat tolerance and tick resistance can be found, and it’s where you’d think.
Insights into early pig domestication provided by ancient DNA analysis. In northern Europe, around 4000 BC, people started crossing pigs from the south with local wild boars. What were they thinking?
Recent grassland losses are concentrated around U.S. ethanol refineries. The revenge of geography.
Provitamin A biofortification of crop plants: a gold rush with many miners. “One crucial aspect that needs further experimentation is whether β-carotene-fortified crops can improve vitamin A status in the main targets of the biofortification efforts, that is, malnourished adults and children.” Just going to leave that out there.
Genomic innovation for crop improvement. Longer reads needed. Is there no satisfying these gene-jockeys?
Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being. Species movements affect ecosystem functioning and service provision: “The indirect effects of climate change on food webs are also expected to compound the direct effects on crops.”
Feeding the Household, Growing the Business, or Just Showing Off? Farmers’ Motivations for Crop Diversity Choices in Papua New Guinea. Some people grow lots of crops because it’s cool. But why wasn’t this done at the intraspecific level?
To Specialize or Diversify: Agricultural Diversity and Poverty Dynamics in Ethiopia. Forget coolness, crop diversity makes you less poor.
Biogeography of nodulated legumes and their nitrogen-fixing symbionts. Australia is weird.
Plantations, outgrowers and commercial farming in Africa: agricultural commercialisation and implications for agrarian change. They all have their place.
Genomic history of the origin and domestication of common bean unveils its closest sister species. Wild populations from northern Peru and Ecuador are not derived from wild Phaseolus vulgaris which migrated there from Mesoamerica but are actually a different species which predates the evolution of wild common bean.
Genomic inferences of domestication events are corroborated by written records in Brassica rapa. Five genetic groups, with rapini at the base.
Walking and talking the tree of life: Why and how to teach about biodiversity. Forget ranks, try clades.

March 27, 2017March 27, 2017

Brainfood: Soil biodiversity maps, VIR wheat, Rice worlds, African maize, Cold rice, Saharan history, Oil palm & CC, GM Cavendish

Assessing soil biodiversity potentials in Europe. The hotspots are the pastures and grasslands of Ireland, Slovenia and Sweden.
Into the vault of the Vavilov wheats: old diversity for new alleles. VIR has diversity that’s not in CIMMYT and Australian cultivars. No word on where ICARDA fits in.
Disembedding grain: Golden Rice, the Green Revolution, and heirloom seeds in the Philippines. There are parallel and competing rice worlds, which differ in how they valorize the local. Or, it could be argued, though not by the authors, demonize the “other.”
Microsatellite DNA marker for molecular characterization of African maize (Zea mays L.) landraces. The Somali material is weird.
Genetic architecture of cold tolerance in rice (Oryza sativa) determined through high resolution genome-wide analysis. 42 QTLs. Is that a lot? It seems like a lot.
Humans as Agents in the Termination of the African Humid Period. Damn livestock. Back to hunting and gathering.
Future climate effects on suitability for growth of oil palms in Malaysia and Indonesia. Well that’s ironic.
Golden bananas in the field: elevated fruit pro-vitamin A from the expression of a single banana transgene. Gene from Fe’i biofortifies Cavendish. Now to do something about taste, texture, general suckiness etc etc.

March 20, 2017March 27, 2017

Brainfood: Silk Road herders, Canadian erosion, Trees & ag, Wheat CWR, Maize adaptation, Stock collections, Tunisian barley, Seed testing, Rosaceae evolution, MRCA, Deforestation

Nomadic ecology shaped the highland geography of Asia’s Silk Roads. Goat Roads doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Agro-biodiversity has increased over a 95 year period at sub-regional and regional scales in southern Quebec, Canada. It’s all in the definition.
Trees for life: The ecosystem service contribution of trees to food production and livelihoods in the tropics. Meta-analysis shows trees and forests are good for crop yields and livelihoods.
Discovery and characterization of two new stem rust resistance genes in Aegilops sharonensis. Chipping away at Ug99.
A study of allelic diversity underlying flowering-time adaptation in maize landraces. That’s a lot of genes.
The challenges faced by living stock collections in the USA. Money, mainly.
Low Genetic Differentiation and Evidence of Gene Flow among Barley Landrace Populations in Tunisia. One big happy family.
Rethinking the approach to viability monitoring in seed genebanks. From germination tests to automated seed storage experiments.
Evolution of Rosaceae Fruit Types Based on Nuclear Phylogeny in the Context of Geological Times and Genome Duplication. A story of whole genome duplications.
Reconstructing the genome of the most recent common ancestor of flowering plants. The mother of all crop wild relatives, before all those duplications, has 23,000 genes and is 214 million years old.
What Drives Deforestation and What Stops It? A Meta-Analysis. Money, and money, respectively.

March 17, 2017

Nibbles: Chocolate & deforestation, Sweet potato breeding, Diversification, Aurochs redux, Flower viewing, Saharan history, CeCaCT

Chocolate makers decide to go green. How about conserving the genetic resources of the crop, though?
“Being a crop breeder in the modern world sometimes feels like being a fire fighter equipped with a very slow truck.”
UNDP supports agricultural diversification.
Reconstructing the aurochs.
We could all do with some hanami. And a hug.
Livestock keeping caused the Sahara?
President of Fiji visits regional genebank. Cue photo of people peering at test tubes.