- Wild cassava relatives could be used for nutritional enhancement.
- “…quality improvement did not significantly reduce the genetic diversity of European and Chinese Brassica rapa cultivars.”
- Byelorussian agrobiodiversity bazaar.
Upstream blast
Blast is one of the worst rice diseases. I believe that, thanks to the breeders, most modern varieties have decent levels of resistance. After all, they can be used in varietal mixtures to protect traditional glutinous rice varieties from blast. ((Zhu, Y., Chen, H., Fan, J., Wang, Y., Li, Y., Chen, J., Fan, J., Yang, S., Hu, L., Leung, H., Mew, T., Teng, P., Wang, Z., & Mundt, C. (2000). Genetic diversity and disease control in rice. Nature, 406 (6797), 718-722 DOI: 10.1038/35021046 Also see this post.)) Unfortunately, much of this resistance is not durable, because the pathogen overcomes it with time.
For a long time, durable resistance has been known to exist in some Japanese varieties. But these varieties have not been useful for resistance breeding, as the resistant parent also brought along undesired characteristics: the offspring always had poor eating quality.
Shuichi Fukuoka and colleagues have found out why. They report in Science ((Fukuoka, S., Saka, N., Koga, H., Ono, K., Shimizu, T., Ebana, K., Hayashi, N., Takahashi, A., Hirochika, H., Okuno, K., & Yano, M. (2009). Loss of Function of a Proline-Containing Protein Confers Durable Disease Resistance in Rice Science, 325 (5943), 998-1001 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175550
see also Normile, D. (2009). New Strategy Promises Lasting Resistance to a Rice Plague Science, 325 (5943), 925-925 DOI: 10.1126/science.325_925)) that it is because of a tight genetic linkage. Resistance is conferred by the Pi21 locus, and:
The eating quality of plants carrying the elite cultivar’s chromosomal sequence from a point less than 2.4 kb downstream of the Pi21 locus was equivalent to that of the elite cultivar, and the plants showed a high level of blast resistance. In contrast, plants carrying the donor chromosomal sequence up to 37 kb downstream of the Pi21 locus showed inferior eating quality.
By crossing in just the right bit of the chromosome, and making sure that the neighboring areas do not tag along, resistance can now be transferred, without spoiling the taste.
Nibbles: Forest smells, Paris herbarium, Native Seeds/SEARCH, Vertical farms, Biofuels
- Taking in the Atmosphere of the Forest is good for you.
- The Paris herbarium sorts itself out. ‘Bout time too.
- Some scientists are … keeping seeds on ice for future generations, but one Arizona seed farm is cultivating them in the desert sun.
- At last. Ford Denison blasts the vertical farm nuts. So we don’t have to.
- Fill ‘er up — with watermelon juice?
A Japanese banana in northern Italy
An advert in a local gardening magazine for something called Freddi Banana, supposedly a cold-tolerant banana “developed” in the northern Italian region of Alto Adige, led me down some interesting online byways. In one place it is a cross between a Japanese and a Nepalese variety, in another its origin is given as Ryukyu Islands, Japan. That’s the chain stretching from Taiwan to Japan. I found the whole thing hard to believe, but a little research revealed that there is indeed a Musa species in the Ryukyu Islands. This is Musa basjoo, and it is the most cold-hardy of bananas. Various cultivars are available commercially.
Musa basjoo is commonly referred to as the Japanese Fibre Banana and it’s native place is given as the Ryukyu (Liu Kiu) Islands. However, Musa basjoo is not the Japanese Fibre Banana. Musa basjoo is not from the Liu Kiu Islands and not from Japan, it is a Chinese species.
So what is the Japanese Fibre Banana, I hear you ask?
The true identity of the Japanese Fibre Banana became known only in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in WWII when the Ryukyu Islands came under the control of the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR). USCAR brought to Okinawa Egbert H. Walker, a staff member of the Department of Botany, Smithsonian Institution who was in charge of the Serviceman’s Collecting Program (SCP) in which US forces members were encouraged to collect and submit botanical and other specimens. But Walker was no desk-bound administrator of the SCP. He was an accomplished field botanist and developed a thorough knowledge of the Ryukyu flora. His work, during which he personally collected over 7,000 plant specimens on Okinawa and neighbouring islands, culminated in his Flora of Okinawa (Walker 1976). Walker made no mention of M. basjoo in this work but did include the ito-basho, Musa liukiuensis, after the treatment of which he commented:
“Seeds from plants [of Musa liukiuensis] in Oku [village in northern Okinawa] were grown in Kingston, Jamaica by the Banana Breeding Scheme of the Banana Board. The seed, seedlings and flowers were reported in 1973 to be identical with those of Musa balbisiana Colla.”
Called ito basho, or “thread banana,” the Japanese Fibre Banana is very important in Ryukyu tradition, much like abacá, a different fibre-producing Musa species, is in the Philippines.
In the old days, bolts of plain-colored, striped and kasuri (ikat) basho-fu were woven in numerous locations across the Ryukyu islands and were used as tribute payments to the Okinawan royalty. In those days, basho-fu was worn by everyone from kings to commoners. Nowadays, however, basho-fu is a luxury cloth that is made only in the village of Kijoka, on the island of Okinawa.
Selling touselle
In 1482, in the month of December, King Louis XI was taken ill at Tours, and had Touzelle [wheat] brought from the diocese of Nismes, so that bread could be made for him. The prince, extremely weak in mind and body, and struck with the fear of death beyond all expression, believed that of all the corners of his kingdom, the diocese of Nismes produced the wheat most likely to bring him to health.
That’s Léon Ménard in his Histoire de Nîmes of 1755. The passage is quoted in a short post in what alas seems now to be a dormant blog about artisanal breadmaking. I got there because I was intrigued by this statement in a box in a GRAIN article by Hélène Zaharia (of Réseau Semences Paysannes) called Bread of life. ((This is a companion piece to breadmaker Andrew Whitley’s The bread we eat, published in 2007.))
Henri is an organic farmer in the south of France. In 1997 he was carrying out research into farming practice in the Gare ((Is this a misprint? I think it should read “Gard.”)) region when he discovered Touselle wheat. It is an early wheat, without whiskers, with a soft grain, very suitable for bread-making. It was once cultivated quite widely in Languedoc and Provence and was appreciated for its good yields, even when it was grown on poor soil in a difficult, dry environment. But by the time Henri became interested in it, it had been widely abandoned in favour of modern varieties.
Henri decided to try it out for himself and obtained a few seeds of four of the 13 varieties of Touselle held in the Department of Genetic Resources at INRA in Clermont-Ferrand.
It turns out that “Henri” (for some reason, no surname is provided in the GRAIN article) is Henri Ferté, and what intrigued me particularly about this passage is that he is a farmer who obtained germplasm directly from a genebank, in this case the Conservatoire de Ressources Génétiques, INRA Clermont-Ferrand. ((“[L]’une des premières collections européennes.”)) This doesn’t happen as much as it could, or should. Or at least I don’t know of that many examples. Henri knew about the genebank because he has “un diplôme d’agro en poche,” as Zaharia says in another, more recent, article (which I cannot find online, but is entitled “Gard: La relance des blés méditerranéens.”). How do less academically qualified farmers find out about what’s in genebanks? It would be great to do a review of such direct use of national genebanks, and why there isn’t more of it. Maybe there is one out there already? Not all users are breeders — we sometimes forget that.
Anyway, Henri seems to have been fairly successful in bringing back touselle, King Louis XI’s miraculous wheat. This was apparently still around — in a number of distinct forms — at the end of the 19th century, but later largely disappeared: “…by 2004 Touselle was being grown experimentally on a fairly large number of peasant farms in the south of France.” A Union for the Promotion of Touselle was established in 2005. It doesn’t look to me like their website has been very active in the intervening years, but that’s no doubt because niche wheat farmers in the south of France have better things to do than mess around on the internet.