Category: Breeding

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Nibbles: Irish Famine book, Breeding for adaptation, Neolithic diets, Randy Thaman, Ecological Babylon, IPR for smallholders, Botanical gardens

  • Don’t underestimate the importance of a new book on the Irish Famine, despite the weird construction used in praising it.
  • Impossible to overestimate the importance of crop breeding for climate change adaptation. And would you like a presentation with that?
  • Cannot underestimate the diversity of early Neolithic diets. No, wait.
  • Difficult to overestimate the contribution made by Prof. Randy Thaman to the conservation of agrobiodiversity in the Pacific. One of several honoured by IUCN for services to conservation.
  • Fed up with linguistic tricks? Well, too bad, because here’s another one. It turns out you can use agricultural biodiversity terminology as examples to explain what’s wrong with ecology.
  • Here we go again. Easy to underestimate the importance of IPR legislation in enabling smallholders to conserve agrobiodiversity.
  • Plain impossible to list the x best botanical gardens in the world.
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Support a plant breeder

One of the strangest crowdsourcing appeals I’ve ever seen landed in my in-tray this morning. Sarvari Research Trust, onlie begetters of Sarpo potatoes, are looking for £5000 in order to bring a new variety to market. And the reason they need the money is that the variety has to be certified and approved by the UK government before it is allowed on sale. That’s how most agricultural biodiversity is managed in the European Union; if a variety isn’t registered, which costs money, it can’t be marketed. To protect us, obviously.

The Sarvari Trust says:

We can’t get grant funding for this kind of work because is thought to be near market research and therefore a private matter. Breeders of GM resistant potatoes do get grant support!

Frankly, I think that’s over-egging the pudding a little. The cost of testing and registering a variety is always going to be a “near-market” issue, and I doubt breeders of GM potatoes get support for that aspect of their work. The real scandal is that the fixed costs of variety registration are a huge burden for a small breeder, and trivial for a large one. And farmers and gardeners who would like access to a greater range of agricultural biodiversity are denied choice as a result.

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Will Ecuador benefit from wild tomato genes?

A tweet alerted me to a story about the value of genes in crop wild relatives.

The source headline is “Galapagos tomato provides key to making cultivated tomatoes resistant to whitefly,” and though it reads like a press release 1 I have so far been unable to run down the original. I did, however, locate the event of note.

By now, Syarifin Firdaus should have successfully defended his graduate thesis on Whitefly Resistance In Tomato and Hot Pepper, which was due to take place today and which I imagine created all the interest.

My interest stemmed from the Twitterer’s question: “Will Ecuador benefit?”

The blurb for Firdaus’ talk makes it clear that after sampling almost 100 genebank accessions, wild Solanum galapagense had the strongest resistance and this seemed to be down to a single gene on chromosome 2. But it also pointed out that resistance was found in two other wild Solanum species, and in several Capsicums.

With these results, introduction of the resistance into modern tomato varieties is feasible and within a few years the first commercial, resistant tomato cultivars are expected on the market.

And that is a good thing not so much because whitefly damage the crop, but because they transmit virus diseases that are really harmful.

The release, which lists all the private sector companies involved in the research, strongly suggests that it will be genes from S. galapagense that will be bred into commercial varieties “within two years”. It also says that “resistance was also found in China, Indonesia and Thailand,” presumably in local tomato varieties rather than wild relatives.

Will Ecuador benefit? I seriously doubt it. Other wild relatives from Ecuador (and elsewhere) have already donated genes worth millions of dollars to the tomato industry, and no precedent has been set.

Should Ecuador benefit? Hard to see why. It isn’t as if S. galapagense (which until relatively recently was treated as a form of S. cheesmaniae, a well-established source of good tomato genes) has been maintained by farmers since time immemorial.

Best yet, tomato isn’t even listed on Annex 1 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Solanum section tuberosa, sure; Solanum melongena, you bet. But Solanum lycopersicum and its wild relatives, outta luck.

Of course, the genetic resource in question might just be covered by the Convention on Biological Diversity, which offers Ecuador and its supporters a glimmer of hope, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

What I really want to know is why S. galapagense is resistant? What are the insect pests on the Galapagos that exerted such strong selection pressure? Perhaps @WayOfThePanda can find out.

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What’s wrong with this picture?

Slideshare is a great resource, but I’m always slightly worried I might be missing something. Take, for example, the presentation on the barriers to adoption by Haven D. Ley, just shared by the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative. In particular, look at the seventh slide. It includes this diagram:

No reference to genebanks? Really? But, who knows, maybe the presenter mentioned the need for an occasional influx of novel diversity, and the best source for that, in their verbal comments on the slide. Or made the point that the diagram is necessarily a simplification. Or even that this is an illustration of how NOT to do breeding. I’d be interested to know what our breeder readers think of this diagram as a representation of their trade.

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Nibbles: Red List, Açaí, Edible forest, Horticulture, Heirloom seed bank, Malnutrition journal, Tea breeding, Speak!