- Frank Rijsberman aims to build a “strong Consortium.”
- Teaching tools aim to improve capacity in plant breeding. And no, I didn’t mean anything by the juxtaposition, settle down.
- Kenyan reality show aims to enhance rural livelihoods. What, are you trying to be funny? No, I tell you, it’s all a massive coincidence.
- You know what, why don’t we just all go to the beach and relax? Nothing like combining work with pleasure…
- You could read the new Plant Cuttings there.
- Or look at 3D photos of cabbages.
- Or fiddle with the latest geeky plant gadget.
- PDF of the European dictionary of domesticated and utilised animals. From the folks at the European Regional Focal Point for Animal Genetic Resources (ERFP). Which is news to me. Relationship to the equivalent on the crops side unclear.
- Speaking of Europe, someone at the Dutch genebank studying gaps in the conservation of crop wild relatives. Welcome to the club.
- Well this sort of thing is not going to help with any gap analysis, is it? Qualifies as assisted migration though, perhaps, which is kinda cool. And may well be needed.
- I wonder what the Brazilian forest code means for crop wild relatives.
- Traditional Japanese rice variety grown in Queensland to help Fukishima victims. Well, yes, but it’s not exactly charity we’re talking about here. And what’s it going to do to all the wild rice there? Which I’m willing to bet is a gap of some kind.
- Speaking of altruistic gestures, the idea to, er, sell the Indian genebank encounters some, er, opposition.
- No plans to sell anything from this new Jersey apple genebank. Except maybe the cider? I wonder, any hazlenut genebanks out there? No, don’t write in and tell me.
- The genebank of the SADC Plant Genetic Resources Centre given a bit of a face-lift on VoA. At least in the trailer, starting at 0:45. Not sure how to get the full thing, but working on it…
- Latvian government plants small veggie patch in meaningless gesture. Paparazzi promptly tread all over it. Not that such things can’t be nice, and indeed useful. Oh, and here comes the history. But maybe they should have taken a slightly different tack.
- “Orange is the colour of curry.” Why spice is nice. And here comes the science on that.
- And speaking of heat, FAO very keen to tell you what zone you’re in. Oh, hell, there go another couple hours down the drain as I try to navigate the thing.
The multifarious history of healthy oats
News of a healthy new oat variety sent me scurrying to the Pedigrees of Oat Lines (POOL) website at Agriculture Canada, but alas BetaGene is not there. However, our source on all things oats tells us of another US cultivar, released some years ago, called HiFi, which is also high in those heart-friendly beta glucans. Our source thinks HiFi was probably involved in developing BetaGene.
HiFi, by the way, includes a whole bunch of wild relatives in its pedigree, including Avena magna, A. longiglumis and A. sterilis. Interestingly, when you check up on that A. magna in GRIN, it turns out that the accession used, which was collected in Khemisset, Morocco in 1964, was originally labelled A. sterilis. It looks as though seeds of a couple of different species were inadvertently placed into a single collecting bag on that far-off summer day in North Africa. The mishap was only recognized when the material was later processed in the USDA genebank, which led to the original sample being divided up. Ah, the perils of crop wild relatives collecting! And ah, the value-adding that genebanks do!
Incidentally, there’s material from at least half a dozen different countries in HiFi’s 1 pedigree. And that, of course, 2 is the standard argument for both genebanks holding diverse collections, and a multilateral system of access to (and sharing of the benefits deriving from the use of) that diversity. Too bad that point is not made in any of the news items about the new variety that have been appearing.
I don’t really understand that. I think “the public” would find it interesting that their porridge, or whatever, includes genetic material from all over the world, and that people have been working very hard for many years to put in place the conditions to allow such sharing to continue. Including an international treaty, no less. Which should really be telling us these stories.
LATER: …as opposed to these.
Nibbles: Banana networking, Belgian flora, On farm breeding course, International collaboration, Wheat pre-breeding, Dog evolution
- ProMusa goes all social.
- Belgian flora goes online.
- Plant breeding goes to the people.
- FAO and ICARDA go together.
- Brits go all in on wheat pre-breeding.
- Modern dog breeds don’t go all the way back to the grey wolf.
Brainfood: Spanish emmer, Lathyrus breeding, Vitis in N Africa, European tree niche models over time
- Remnant genetic diversity detected in an ancient crop: Triticum dicoccon Schrank landraces from Asturias, Spain. Strong geographic differentiation even at small scales.
- Grass pea (Lathyrus sativus): Is there a case for further crop improvement? Yes, but then they would say that, wouldn’t they.
- Highly polymorphic nSSR markers: A useful tool to assess origin of North African cultivars and to provide additional proofs of secondary grapevine domestication events. North African cultivars do not derive from North African wild strains. Did anyone really think they did? Well, I guess it’s good to have the data.
- Building the niche through time: using 13,000 years of data to predict the effects of climate change on three tree species in Europe. You have to take into account past distributions when predicting future ones.
Tracking down those sodium exclusion genes in wheat: Part 2
The story thus far: Our plucky heroes have traced Triticum monococcum C68-101, the wild parent of a tetraploid wheat (Line 149) with interesting salinity tolerance genes, to the University of Sydney. Maybe. Kinda. Sort of. But they keep digging, and their perseverance is not long in being rewarded. We hear again from Ray Hare.
You may remember that you asked me back in March to track down the source details of the T. monococcum used as the donor of the sodium exclusion genes Nax1 and 2. At last after some detective work I have a fairly good set of identifiers that match up.
The original seed, that was obtained by the University of Sydney, came as part of a collection of monococcums from Dr Ralph Riley of the Plant Breeding Institute, Cambridge. Prof. Eldrid Baker assembled this collection of Triticum species back in the 1960’s. C68-101 is an accession identifier in the University of Sydney Wheat register with the accession number NS 3637. It is also known as “Triticum aegilopoides – 3″. All of the entries in the University species collection have now been lodged with the Australian Winter Cereals Collection where this monococcum accession has the AUS number 98382.
I have not been able to trace the original collection location. It is likely to be Israel or a neighbouring country. PBI Cambridge had links with the Hebrew University. I have seen no shortage of all manner of Triticum species in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.
I would be fairly confident that other monococcums have these Nax genes. We checked out two others from this set and each one showed Na exclusion activity. We simply had to select one accession to conduct our studies.
As I said before, the A genome diploids remain rather under researched. Who knows what may come from this ploidy level. It is quite possible that few diploids were involved in the original formation of the progenitor tetraploids and some of this A genome variation has been lost in the formation of the hexaploids. The total variation in the A genome in hexaploids is likely to be small when referenced back to that in the monococcums. I have seen good isozyme variation evidence that clearly supports this belief, in the order of a few orders of magnitude.
I am happy to be of additional assistance.