- Brazil revises its National Biodiversity and Action Plan and wants to mainstream biodiversity and nutrition.
- That’s a really old cheese.
- Are you conducting projects testing how the presence of trees affects food production and natural resource management? CIFOR would like to hear from you.
- ICRISAT super-chickpea takes over India.
- And CIAT amylose-free starch cassava to take over Brazil. China next?
- Red Stripe to use cassava. Jamaica? No, they really did want to make cassava beer. Well, come on, things are peachy with cassava bread, why not beer?
Nibbles: Foley Heinz award, C4 rice history, Fish feeding Africa, Sustainable harvesting, Sorghum death, Carver, Improving crops, Commodity production
- Jonathan Foley, @GlobalEcoGuy, lands well deserved award for his straight-talking on food issues.
- I wonder what he’d say about C4 rice.
- Not sure he’s ever written about fish, but he probably will.
- Sustainable harvesting of Prunus africana maybe not so sustainable after all. Well, I guess that’s science.
- Encomium to the recently-deceased “Father of Sorghum.”
- Shame he missed the round-up on improving abiotic stress tolerance in crops, linked to by AoB Blog.
- Wouldn’t it have been cool if the Father of Sorghum had met the Peanut Man?
- Global production of 10 top commodities has increased 130% since 1960, population by 89%. Draw your own conclusions about world hunger and malnutrition.
Nibbles: Plant Guardians, Peruvian Solanum, Sunflower genomics, California drought, Brazil drought, Sri Lankan tea, Minnesota wine, Seed of Hope, Sugarcane engineering, King Cotton, Rubber boom
- Do you want to be a Plant Guardian?
- Some people are already getting busy guarding Solanum in Peru.
- The sunflower family gets a molecular makeover.
- What the California drought means for food.
- And the one in Brazil for coffee.
- And tea in Sri Lanka is also in trouble, though for once drought is not to blame.
- Minnesota has a wine industry thanks to wild relatives. But I won’t hold that against them.
- In today’s Seeds of X story, X=hope and the place is Aceh.
- If sugarcane was a cold-tolerant oil-producing crop, would it still be sugarcane?
- Cotton has a lot to answer for. Or rather, the people who grew it do. Or did. Oh crap.
- Rubber too. Though not as much. I guess. Oh crap.
Nibbles: CGIAR priorities, Drought tolerant rice, Agroecology bibliography, Amaranthus seed production video, Ethiopian genebank, Yemeni genebank
- UN Special Rapporteur on food thinks “questions of the 60s are not the questions of today.” Does he think the CGIAR is answering the questions of the 60s? One suspects so, but surely there are points of agreement, e.g. nutrition, food systems, natural resources management…
- Farmers would be willing to pay quite a premium for drought tolerant (DT) rice hybrids, but for DT varieties not so much. That’s an opportunity for public-private partnerships. Or is that a 60s answer to a 60s question?
- Mr de Schutter probably knows all about this bibliography of agroecology in action. Which all seems so much more 60s than hybrid rice somehow.
- How 60s is it to want to produce decent amaranthus seed? It’s totally unfair, but I can’t resist linking to this now.
- Ethiopian genebank, set up in response to the genetic erosion of the 60s, gets nice, long writeup in The Guardian by way of introduction to a bare-bones couple of final paragraphs on some G8 poverty reduction plan. Nice video though.
- There was no Facebook in the 60s for genebanks to strut their stuff on.
CGN18108 it is
Simon Foster very kindly took the trouble to post a comment setting the record straight on the source of that blight gene:
Apologies, a previous tweet from ourselves erroneously confirmed the accession as CGN18000. It is in fact CGN18108 which is still listed in the database as Solanum okadae (was subsequently found to be S. venturii in DNA fingerprinting studies).
The origin of Rpi-vnt1 is detailed in the original research paper describing the cloning and characterisation of the gene and which is cited in the Roy. Soc. paper published yesterday. All acknowledgement of sources was published in that paper.
Foster SJ, Park T-H, Pel M, Brigneti G, Sliwka J, Jagger L, van der Vossen E, Jones JDG. 2009 Rpi- vnt1.1, a Tm-2(2) homolog from Solanum venturii, confers resistance to potato late blight. MPMI 22, 589 – 600. (doi:10.1094/MPMI-22-5-0589)
Here’s the relevant bit of that paper:
Accessions of S. venturii and S. okadae were obtained from the Centre for Genetics Resources in Wageningen, the Netherlands (CGN) (Table 1). The S. venturii accessions were originally listed as S. okadae in the CGN database but have recently been reclassified based on work using amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers to study the validity of species labels in Solanum section Petota (Jacobs 2008; Jacobs et al. 2008).
So my apologies to Dr Foster. There is indeed a very full and proper acknowledgement of the source of the gene in the earlier paper. However, I do still think that it would not really have taken much effort to also include an acknowledgement in the later paper. The confusion over which accession was actually used that I fell into, admittedly without taking the trouble of following the references, is evidence of why it’s important to do so.
Now to suggest to CGN that they may want to change the species name of CGN18108 in their database…
LATER: Just realized we started talking about all this quite a while ago.