Category: Breeding

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Wheat that goes around, comes around

ResearchBlogging.orgThere’s lots of fascinating material in Robert Spengler’s new review paper on Agriculture in the Central Asian Bronze Age. ((Spengler, R. (2015). Agriculture in the Central Asian Bronze Age Journal of World Prehistory, 28 (3), 215-253 DOI: 10.1007/s10963-015-9087-3)) This map of the region comes from an earlier paper of his, but sets the scene nicely.

F1.large

The thesis of the latest paper is that the conventional model of mixed agropastoralism in Central Asia gradually becoming typical nomadic pastoralism needs to be rethought. In fact, Spengler says, after looking in detail at the archaeological evidence, the mixed pastoral economies of the Bronze Age, with their distinctive package of crops derived from both further east and west in place by 2500 BC, actually intensified into the Iron Age. The result was “irrigated agriculture, sedentary villages, and a drastically altered anthropogenic landscape.”

I may come back to that in a later post, but here I want to focus on what I learned about wheat. I knew that the Green Revolution was based in large part on the use of Rht genes from a Japanese wheat called Norin 10. These genes cause dwarfing, and allow the wheat plant to divert energy into the grain rather than the straw. Yields shot up in places like India, and the Borlaug legend was born.

What I didn’t know is that there was so-called “Indian dwarf wheat” in Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern India before the Green Revolution, characterized by

…dense strong culms and erect blades, a condensed spike which expresses with short awns, glumes, and a hemispherical grain. In addition, it has increased tillering and a reduced rate of lodging…

All of the wheat found in Bronze Age Central Asia seems to have been of this type too, as far as one can tell by comparing archaeobotanical remains with herbarium and genebank material. And similar material turns up in sites in Japan and Korea a millennium and more later. Spengler is circumspect, asking for genetic studies, but it is certainly an intriguing possibility that

…pre-Harappan farmers in India bred a phenotype that would later alter agriculture globally.

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Nibbles: Oyster wars, Bitter veggies, Saffron, Ag & development, Cannabis taxonomy, Mold evolution, Svalbard & ICARDA, Blueberry taste

  • The land sparing vs sharing debate encapsulated in a controversy over San Francisco oyster farming.
  • Bitter is good.
  • BBC’s Farming Today on saffron in England, among other things.
  • Want sustainable development? Invest in agriculture.
  • Growing weed: here comes the science.
  • “When you chew on a Camembert rind, you’re eating a solid mat of mold.” And probably GM to boot.
  • Why do I sound so totally unprepared?
  • Breeding better blueberries.
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Nibbles: Pig landrace, Campbell’s Soup tomato, HarvestPlus, CG & SDGs, Georgian wine, American vegetables, Kenya & nutrition, Equator Prize, Wheat breeding

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That New Yorker story on heirlooms and Luther Burbank

ResearchBlogging.orgOn Friday Luigi nibbled the New Yorker’s recent story What Comes After Heirloom Seeds?, singling out Luther Burbank rather than the more contentious issue of where plant breeding is headed. The New Yorker’s fact-checking is legendary, at least among a certain demographic, in which I number myself. So I want to draw attention to a single punctuation mark, which in my view is imbued with as much snidery as a punctuation mark can be.

Burbank’s prolificacy grew out of a creativity that could seem almost shameless. He was willing to cross just about anything that had leaves: a plum with an apricot (originally a plumcot, now a pluot); a tomato with a potato (a worthless novelty); a blackberry with an apple (no clue); a peach with an almond (!). Burbank’s theoretical validation came from Charles Darwin and his 1876 survey, “The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom,” which Burbank seems to have mistaken for a how-to manual. He called himself an “evoluter” of plants.

Can you spot it? Yup, it’s that exclamation mark after the peach X almond cross. At first, I took the whole paragraph to be an expression of the author wilfully showing off his ignorance. After all, the examples seem like pretty obvious crosses to me. So I did a little cursory fact-checking of my own. Seems he’s a gardener. No, wait, he writes about gardening; not the same thing at all.

Why the surprise at peach X almond then? Blowed if I know. So I’ll just science it to death.

Section Amygdalus and section Persicae are closer [to] each other than to any other sections.

What that means is that the peach and the almond were probably the most closely related of the crosses Burbank made, and thus probably the easiest and the least worthy of notice.

The quote is from Phylogeny and Classification of Prunus sensu lato (Rosaceae), by Shuo Shi, Jinlu Li, Jiahui Sun, Jing Yu and Shiliang Zhou, published in the Journal of Integrative Biology (2013) 55: 1069–1079. ((Shi S, Li J, Sun J, Yu J, & Zhou S (2013). Phylogeny and classification of Prunus sensu lato (Rosaceae). Journal of integrative plant biology, 55 (11), 1069-1079 PMID: 23945216))

I’m surprised the New Yorker wasn’t aware of it.

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Wheat scientists descend on Sydney

The International Wheat Congress kicks off in Sydney this week, with its stellar lineup of speakers, and social media accoutrements, to remind us that, despite all the talk of gluten intolerance and the like, wheat is a big deal…

…it’s under threat, but CGIAR is on it:

About 70 percent of spring bread and durum wheat varieties released globally over the 20-year period between 1994 and 2014 were bred or are derived from wheat lines developed by [CGIAR]… Benefits of CGIAR wheat improvement research, conducted mainly by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), range from $2.8 billion to $3.8 billion a year…which highlights the economic benefits of international collaboration in wheat improvement research.