- Don’t understand the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation? Fear not, help is at hand.
- Don’t understand livestock genetics? Fear not, help is at hand.
- Don’t understand how ICTs could assist agricultural development? Fear not, help is at hand.
- Don’t understand how climate change affects vegetable genetic resources. Fear not, do this postdoc at Wageningen and you will.
Getting to grips with hairy vetch
A post over at Biofortified entitled “Will cover crops feed the world?” asked an intriguing question:
Why not take a survey of red clover and hairy vetch germplasm, looking for those that fix nitrogen at high rates, have good winter survival, and decay at a reasonable rate to provide fertilizer for crops the following year, and then combine those traits? (And while you’re at it, you could try to do something about hairy vetch’s horrendous seed yield. Non-shattering trait, anyone?)
Well, I thought to myself, maybe you can find those traits already combined. So I looked on Genesys to see what germplasm of Vicia villosa, or hairy vetch, we have to play with. Quite a bit as it turns out: 1374 accessions from 60-odd countries, conserved in 30-odd genebanks. These are the accessions which have georeferences:
I looked in a little more detail at the USDA collection over at GRIN. As luck would have it, there are data on 40-odd accessions from a 2001 evaluation trial. Among the descriptors recorded are N content and winter survival. I downloaded the Excel spreadsheet, and some quick sorting revealed a couple of accessions which are both high in N and have decent winter survival, eg PI 232958 from Hungary and PI 220880 from Belgium. Another dataset shows that some accessions in the collection are non-shattering. Alas, neither of the previous two accessions were characterized for that trait, or at least I couldn’t find the data online, but I was intrigued to see that PI 220879, also from Belgium, is non-shattering.
I posted Biofortified’s question on Facebook too and Dirk Enneking came back almost immediately with more advice:
Provorov and Tikhonovich suggest that the recently domesticated species such as Vicia villosa are better at N-fix. For non-shattering, try the named cultivars such as Ostsaat etc. and grow them where there is sufficient humidity at harvest time to reduce shattering.
Now, where’s my finder’s fee?
Evaluating nutrition interventions
The Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating Centre has a review out of “agricultural interventions that aim to improve nutritional status of children.” There is both good and bad news. The bad news is that
The studies reviewed report little or no impact of agricultural interventions on the nutritional status of children. This result confirms the results of previous systematic reviews on the same topic.
Ouch. The good news is that
…unlike previous reviews, we attribute this result to the lack of statistical power of the studies reviewed rather than to the lack of efficacy of these interventions.
Hardly reassuring, though, is it. A couple of orange sweet potato (OSP) studies are included in the review. As I said in a post a couple of days back on a recent paper on OSP, which came too late for this review, evaluation of nutritional and health impacts is hard. Perhaps the new Bioversity publication “Improving nutrition with agricultural biodiversity” will help? It might with project design, but its section on evaluation doesn’t seem particularly detailed, and there’s nothing on impact assessment. Maybe that’s to come? Hopefully someone from Bioversity will tell us.
Nibbles: Push-pull award, MVP review, Thoroughbred breeding, Rice info, Aquaculture Clinic
- Push-pull pulls in prize.
- Which is more than can be said for the Millennium Villages Project. I wish someone would occupy them.
- You can have too much good breeding. If you’re a horse.
- Nice aerial pics of rice cultivation. And a sort of information service on that cereal called Rice 2.0, which unaccountably lacks an RSS feed.
- WorldFish invites entrepreneurs to get together and discuss investing in aquaculture. Here’s hoping diversity won’t be left in the dust.
Brainfood: OSP adoption, Milk quality, Passport data quality, Historical collections, Sweet potato domestication, African veggies, Baobab diversity and domestication, Cassava diversity, Strawberry breeding, Barley GWA, Pest symbionts, Maize diversity and climate change
- A large-scale intervention to introduce orange sweet potato in rural Mozambique increases vitamin A intakes among children and women. Just 1 year of training worked just as well as a higher intensity intervention (3 years) in increasing OSP and vitamin A intake by younger children, older children and women, and decreasing prevalence of inadequate vitamin A intakes. OSP represented about half of all sweet potatoes consumed so I guess there was not complete replacement of local varieties.
- Composition of milk from minor dairy animals and buffalo breeds: a biodiversity perspective. There are significant interbreed and inter-species differences. Dromedary milk is closest to cow milk, mare and donkey milk maybe the healthiest, but moose milk is the one I’d like to try.
- Quality indicators for passport data in ex situ genebanks. That would be the genebanks in Eurisco. Verdict: not bad, but could do better. Most variation in quality is among institutes.
- Exploring the population genetics of genebank and historical landrace varieties. Old samples of dead seeds of 4 crops in Swedish museum jars more genetically variable than genebank accessions, but it’s not the genebank’s fault. And at least their seeds are still alive. Also no genetic correspondence between geographically matched museum and genebank samples.
- Combining chloroplast and nuclear microsatellites to investigate origin and dispersal of New World sweet potato landraces. Two areas of domestication, probably from a single wild progenitor species: lowland NW South America and lowland Central America/Caribbean. Genetic differences between these 2 genepools not accompanied by morphological differences, but then again nobody’s looked properly, and the current descriptors are useless anyway.
- The significance of African vegetables in ensuring food security for South Africa’s rural poor. Their huge potential is being thwarted by evil extensionists. Ok, but don’t we need to move beyond that?
- Comparative study on baobab fruit morphological variation between western and south-eastern Africa: opportunities for domestication. Hang on a minute, aren’t there a million factsheets about all this?
- Marriage exchanges, seed exchanges, and the dynamics of manioc diversity. Kinship structures determine cassava diversity patterns in Gabon. Matrilineal societies have more diversity.
- Interspecific hybridization of diploids and octoploids in strawberry. You get pentaploid and tetraploid plants.
- Genome wide association analyses for drought tolerance related traits in barley (Hordeum vulgare L.). Ok, deep breath. Over 200 accessions, both wild and cultivated, from 30 countries, so quite variable, but also structured. There were some QTLs that differed between dry and wet sites, but they didn’t explain much phenotypic variation, and they couldn’t be related to previous work. So GWA not much use, probably because of population structure. But couldn’t that have been predicted? And isn’t it possible to do something about structure in the analysis?
- Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Mostly proteobacteria. So my question is, could somehow attacking the symbionts form the basis of a pest management strategy?
- Projecting the effects of climate change on the distribution of maize races and their wild relatives in Mexico. Many races and wild relatives are predicted to shift in geographic distribution. Unless of course agronomy intervenes. Teocinte taxa should be collected.