Late blight resistant potato varieties don’t just come from Hungary, for use in Europe. They’re also increasingly important back in potato’s homeland, Peru. The CGIAR Consortium had a short story a couple of days back about Pallay Poncho and Puka Lliclla, two late blight resistant clones that CIP has been developing in collaboration with 200 Andean families in an area where an outbreak in 2003 devastated the harvest, the first time that has happened at such high altitude. But hopefully now the last, at least for a while, because of these new varieties. I wanted to know if material from countries other than Peru was involved in this work, but a glitch in CIP’s online database doesn’t make it easy to check that. Although you do get a pedigree for each variety, when you click on the ancestors you mainly get an error, which just means that particular clone is not conserved. You’d have to search for the family from which that clone came to trace back the full ancestry of each variety (by cutting off the digits after the decimal point in the accession number), which would be interesting to do, no doubt, but too laborious for me just now in my fragile, jetlagged state. Maybe the CIP informatics unit will look into it? I’ll let you know if they do.
Nibbles: Encomium to Bioversity, PGR economics, Europe newsletter, Mapping urban veggies, Piper, Fruit breeding
- On farm conservation; Bioversity is really good at it. (And I sometimes make a linking mistake; mea maxima culpa.)
- Economics of plant genetic resource management for adaptation to climate change. What’s the bottom line? No idea.
- Something else Bioversity is really good at: newsletters.
- Using GIS to help communities map vegetable production and marketing in Bangkok. I like the acronym: V-GIS.
- The variety of non-chile peppers.
- Older fruits better. Quentin Crisp unavailable for comment.
Brainfood: Cotton, Wheat
- Archaeogenomic Evidence of Punctuated Genome Evolution in Gossypium. Egyption cotton is not very stable.
- On-farm dynamic management of genetic diversity: the impact of seed diffusions and seed saving practices on a population-variety of bread wheat. More studies of Rouge de Bordeaux show that population diversity mirrors seed-exchange systems.
Nibbles: Potaghurt, Yams, New fodder crops, Enset, Cowpea migrations, Trees
- Sweet potato and milk “potaghurt”. Just one way Ghanaian women gain from roots and tubers.
- Another way being through a US$12 million project “to boost yam productivity”.
- Dual purpose crops to sustain livestock and people in India.
- Qocho in Chicago. Calling enset “false-banana” doesn’t do it justice.
- Cowpeas came to Mexico from three separate continents, but is The Beaneater really eating cowpeas? Not necessarily.
- We need to see the trees for the woods, says a new book from ICRAF.
Nibbles: Goats, Seed Fairs, Banana genebank, Prunus africana plans, Forage grass, English food, Talking heads
- USAID and partners to probe African goat breeds for performance measures.
- FAO sings the praises of its seed fairs in South Sudan.
- Bioversity’s banana genebank gets a big write-up.
- Prunus africana, the aged gentleman’s friend, could also be the Kenyan farmers’ friend. In about 40 years time. If we start now.
- And speaking of domestication, efforts to tame Panicum turgidum as a new forage grass are under way.
- It wasn’t industrialisation that made English food bad, no matter what a Nobel Laureate may think.
- All that #abdchat, just in case you missed it live.