- UK breeders scour ICARDA’s fava beans for better genes. What next? Chianti?
- Olive cultivation then and now. An archaeologist speaks.
- Entomophagy.
- Lager yeast origins.
- Salvia divinorum: underutilized no longer.
Nibbles: Seed hunter, Milk, Wine, Pollinators, Cacao, Berries
- Seed hunter hunts cash. Australians can watch on 21 October.
- Is selling milk retail really diversification? Alex thinks so.
- In vino variety. Jeremy sez: “Theft (of headline) is flattery”.
- Pollinator presence plummets. Luigi also sez: “Theft (of headline) is flattery”.
- Cacao Germplasm Evaluation and Characterization Project. Nuff said.
- Ribes redux.
Nibbles: Poppies, Gardening, Milk, Grapes, Genebanks, Meat, Biotech, IK, Plant health
- Dropping the poppy.
- Gardening on windowsills and along roadsides.
- Cooling camel milk. Via.
- Fingerprinting grapes.
- “The seed banks that are run by agribusiness corporations would be a costly pursuit for the government and farmers.” Where to start responding to this? Thanks, Jeff.
- Further evidence of food price crisis.
- “What does biodiversity mean to Syngenta?“
- Traditional healer goes online. Via.
- Videos from Global Plant Clinic.
Another feel-good crop wild relative story
When I saw news stories a short while back about a new peanut variety called Tifguard, famous for having resistance to both peanut root-knot nematode and tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV), the main question I had was where the resistance(s) came from. So I consulted our resident peanut expert, and it turns out that the nematode resistance gene in Tifguard came from the variety COAN. Which in turn got it from the wild relative Arachis cardenasii. And by conventional breeding, no less.
Although saying that glosses over the fact that Charles Simpson‘s introgression programme at Texas A&M sometimes involved making more than a thousand meticulous interspecific crosses just to get a single seed. Nobody ever said using crop wild relatives in breeding programmes was easy! Anyway, this is a truly exemplary case of what can be done to incorporate genes from crop wild relatives into improved cultivars using “conventional” breeding methods.
Not much A. cardenasii in GRIN or SINGER. ((Although I’m sorry to say I wasn’t actually able to get SINGER to give me much more than the total number of accessions, and that after a bit of a struggle. Who knows, maybe our resident peanut expert can do something about that. Anyway, do let me know if you have better luck.)) GBIF adds data from a couple of herbaria, but in total we’re talking about no more than about 30 records or so, some of which are no doubt duplicates.
MUCH LATER: Follow-up, with live links!
Nibbles: Extension, Seed, Vegetables, Sushi, Beetroot
- Talking to farmers. Gotta love it.
- ASTA’s Guide to Seed Management Practices. Need to register, but it’s not a big deal.
- The next Oxford Symposium will take place at St Catz on 12-14 September 2008. The Topic is Vegetables. Jeremy will be there.
- Fishy diversity … and not in a good way.
- Everything you ever wanted to know about Chioggia beets but were afraid to ask.