Category: Breeding

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Improved varieties in West Africa

This just in from FAO’s Seed and Plant Genetic Resources Service (AGPS).

Please find below links to the West African Catalogue of Plant Species and Varieties (COAFEV). This document was prepared in the framework of the West African Seed Regulation Harmonization, which was supported by AGP. This process involved 17 West and Central African countries of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and of the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS) and has led to the adoption of a harmonized seed regulatory framework by the ECOWAS Council of Ministers on 18 May 2008 in Abuja.

This framework provides for the establishment of the COAFEV, which is the list of varieties whose seeds can be produced and commercialized in the member states without restriction. The objective of such a system is to facilitate West African farmers’ access to a greater diversity of varieties and to foster cross-border seed trade.

English version.

French version.

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Pundit in the Punjab

On the Front Lines of the Global Food Crisis is the title of what promises to be a great series of posts over at Slate. I nibbled an earlier one a couple of days back, but I think this deserves more attention. The pieces are by Mira Kamdar, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and the author of Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the Largest Democracy and the Future of Our World. She’s touring India, and the third and latest in her despatches from the front lines is from Ludhiana in the Punjab:

If a single institution can take credit for bringing the Green Revolution to Punjab, it is Punjab Agricultural University.

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Re-synthesizing crops

Jeremy recently mused about the possibility of reconstructing the cultivated peanut. As coincidence would have it, a brace of papers just out look at the same thing for a couple of other crops.

A team from the US, Canada and Turkey describe in Euphytica how they reconstructed the modern cultivated dessert strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa) by crossing F. virginiana and F. chiloensis. That’s what happened in the 18th century in some gardens in Britanny once the Chilean strawberry, cultivated for a thousand years by the Mapuche, found its way there after its introduction to Europe by the French spy, Captain Amédée-François Frézier, and met the wild Virginia strawberry. That had started replacing the local cultivated F. vesca in European gardens up to a century before. The researchers were able to come up with significantly better varieties of dessert strawberry by being careful to choose a wider range of elite, complementary genotypes as parents.

And over at GRACE, Iranian and Japanese researchers looked for areas where cultivated tetraploid (durum) wheat is found together with the other putative parent of bread wheat, i.e. wild/weedy Aegilops tauschii. They found the two species in close proximity in two districts in the central Alborz Mountains. So, the “association hypothesized in the theory of bread wheat evolution staill exists in the area where bread wheat probably originated.” The paper does not report finding any natural hybrids, but it does suggest that further field studies should be undertaken, presumably to look for evidence of such introgression.

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Plant Breeding Electronic Journal Club launched

Just in from GBIP.

The GIPB Knowledge Resource Center is launching the Plant Breeding Electronic Journal Club, a virtual place that allows communities to meet and critically evaluate plant breeding and related fields’ articles in the scientific literature.

This e-Journal Club is directed to professionals and students interested in discussing relevant plant breeding themes and issues.   Its majors objectives are to help improve skills of understanding and debating current topics of interest to plant breeding and to promote intellectually stimulating and  professionally rewarding exchange with colleagues from around the world.

This e-Journal Club will use Fireboard, a forum component fully integrated to the GIPB website, which allows implementation of many e-Journal Club groups simultaneously. Dr. Fred Bliss kindly agreed to serve as the convener of this first GIPB e-Journal Club, which will discuss the article “Quantitative  Genetics, Genomics, and the Future of Plant Breeding” by Dr. Bruce Walsh.

In order to participate you just need to follow the instructions in the front page of the GIPB website.  Registration is now opened and the e-Journal Club will start on Wednesday, 6 August 2008.

Please, note that discussion in this first e-Journal Club will be held in English, but proposals of conveners willing to start e-Journal Clubs in other languages can be sent to gipb@fao.org.