Category: Breeding

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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.

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Nibbles: Mongolia, Fruit & veg, Lima bean, Biofuels, Peyote, Permaculture, Extension

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Psst! Wanna breed corn?

Karl J. Mogel from Inoculated Mind dropped us a note: “as part of my graduate school research, I’m making educational videos about plant breeding, and I just uploaded the first of them to my program’s website. Please consider linking to it in one of your blog posts.”

My pleasure!

So, off I went to the University of Wisconsin Madison’s web site to see. ((At this point, I have to say that last time I was in Madison we went to the ag students’ experimental ice cream facility and I was truly stunned by the quality of their results. Is that still going strong, I wonder? And are they still deep-frying cheese in Monroe?)) I couldn’t actually see a video there, but no matter, there were instructions for how to deal with that problem, and pretty soon I found myself watching Karl’s effort.

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It’s really good.
There’s lots of diversity on display and you’ll learn about much more than just pollination. I learned, for example, that nowadays the commercial production of hybrid corn seed uses a specialized detasselling tractor to cut the male flowers off the plants that are destined to grow the hybrid seed. There are genes that make the male flowers sterile, and they used to be used in almost all corn breeding, but Karl told us that although these male sterility genes are used in breeding other crops, they are “not as extensively used in maize”. He didn’t mention that the reason is that the widespread use of a single cytoplasmic male sterility gene was the underlying factor behind the dreadful epidemic of southern corn leaf blight that devastated maize growers in 1970 and 1971. All the corn had the CMS gene, which also conferred susceptibility to southern corn blight.
The other thing that wasn’t mentioned was that if you fancy doing a bit of corn breeding, even mass selection rather than specific hybrid crosses, you need to save seeds from around 100 plants each time, otherwise you end up with inbred seed that doesn’t do very well.
Go to it, and let us know how you get on.
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Nibbles: Maize, Climate change, Erosion (not), Bees squared, Cordyceps, Apples, City gardens