Category: Breeding

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Melaku Worede says Africa must protect plant genetic resources

“I get very worried when new technologies are developed and oriented towards exploiting the African farmers. It’s wrong for big agro-multinationals to force African farmers to use new seed varieties which will disempower them and lead to dependency when local varieties suitable to local conditions can be enhanced.

“I get very concerned when European plant genetic researchers use African farmers as guinea pigs. What they cannot do in Europe they do it here in Africa,” said Dr. Melaku, renowned for his pioneering work in plant genetic research and his role in restoring Ethiopia’s food security and plant resources.

This is from a long interview with Melaku Worede in Black Star News. I wonder how accurate the interview is. Doesn’t sound much like the champion of plant genetic resources of old.

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Free the grape!

I blogged a few weeks back about the shift in the approach being taken in Europe to protect traditional farmers and producers — and the agrobiodiversity which underpins their livelihoods — in the face of globalization. Rather that erecting subsidies and tariffs to compete on price, the idea is to move upmarket and sell expensive niche products to rich foreigners. Of course, that requires a quality control and labelling system, such as appellations of origin (aka geographical indications).

Well, there’s a downside to such systems. I was idly going through my feed reader today and I ran across an old post on The Fruit Blog (a great blog which unfortunately seems to have gone dormant of late) which pointed to a 2004 article in the International Herald Tribune about how legislation is being used in Europe to basically outlaw some old American grapevine varieties:

The story has been all but forgotten in France today except among a handful of wine experts and a gaggle of bureaucrats who enforce the law. The French government banned wine made from American grape varieties on the grounds that it tasted like raspberries and was thus offensive to the palate. The European Commission adopted the French rule in 1979, making it illegal to grow these varieties anywhere in the European Union.

The percentage of outlawed American grape varieties is relatively small in France. But the offending vines are also sprinkled widely throughout several East and Central European countries that have recently joined or will soon join the European Union.

“You can’t tell the Hungarians, Bulgarians and Romanians to uproot their vines,” says Pierre Galet, perhaps the world’s leading expert on grape varieties. He believes the ban on American varieties is anachronistic.

Shades of what Jeremy has called Europe’s draconian seed laws. The US, in contrast, is not shy about mixing up the American and European grapevine genepools (I have blogged about this before: funny how much I write about wine).

As I say, the IHT article is a few years old, and things may have changed. Something is afoot in the EU with regards to wine legislation, but I wasn’t able to find any more recent analysis of the specific issue of the old American varieties. If you know the latest Brussels scoop on this, let us know.

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What’s your poison?

One of the more interesting — and controversial — uses of biodiversity, both wild and agricultural, is to cause altered states of consciousness. As luck would have it, there were three things sort of on this topic which caught my eye today.

First, a short article from the New Scientist appeared in my feed reader about how the UN Environment Programme has singled out for conservation a chunk of desert in Chihuahua, northern Mexico. The importance of this area comes from the fact that it is the home of the peyote cactus, source of the hallucinogenic alkaloid mescaline, and objective of an annual pilgrimage by the Huichol people.

Then there was a EurekAlert piece about funding for an attempt to breed new varieties of the opium poppy and of cannabis that could be used to produce useful bioproducts, but not illicit drugs. This is apparently all going to take place in an ultra-secure Canadian mine shaft. Maybe they could then store the resulting seed in another famous hole in the ground?

And finally, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has a cool interactive map where you can find out about famous British brewers.

Mescaline, dope and beer. In the words of Major T.J. “King” Kong, “Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that agrobiodiversity.” Well, he almost said that.

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Hot or not? A SNP provides the answer

ResearchBlogging.orgTime was when you tested how hot a chilli pepper was by tasting a teeny bit with your tongue, at least if you were brave. The hotter it tasted, the more capsaicin it contained, and the hotter it was. Then came Wilbur Scoville and his eponymous scale. ((An extract of the pepper is diluted with sugar water until a panel of testers can no longer detect any heat. Thus a mild little pepperoncino scores around 500 SHU (Scoville Heat Units), meaning that the extract has to be diluted 500 times to lose all heat, while a decent African birdseye starts at around 100,000 SHU. And Luigi’s little hottie Naga Jolokia is ten times hotter still, at 1,040,000 SHU.)) Now, all you need is a well-equipped molecular biology laboratory.

Maria Arnedo-Andrés and her crew have identified a single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP, associated with pungency in chillies. ((Ana Garcés-Claver, Shanna Moore Fellman, Ramiro Gil-Ortega, Molly Jahn and María S. Arnedo-Andrés (2007) Identification, validation and survey of a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) associated with pungency in Capsicum spp. Theoretical and Applied Genetics, 115: 907-916. DOI 10.1007/s00122-007-0617-y.)) A snip is a single letter difference between the DNA of two different organisms. Sometimes a SNP makes a visible and important difference to the organism. The genetic difference that causes sickle cell anemia is one such SNP. More often, the SNP is just a marker. It is associated with some other difference, but does not actually cause it. Breeders like markers because they allow them to quickly see whether some desired gene has been inherited after a breeding experiment. If the marker is there, chances are the nearby gene is there too. There are gazillions of known SNPs out there, mapped to squillions of differences. But, until now, no SNP that could tell you whether a chilli pepper was hot.

There have been markers before, but they were either unreliable, failing to distinguish hot from sweet. Or they were physically a long way away from the actual genes for hotness, meaning that they were not very useful to breeders.

The researchers grew a wide range of peppers, different species and different varieties. Two people tasted five ripe fruits from each type of plant. If all five were not pungent, the plant was considered non-pungent. But if just one fruit (or more) tasted hot, the plant was considered pungent. Then comes the magic, actually detecting the sequence differences among the different samples.

They found one; in all pungent varieties, and only pungent varieties, there is a letter G at position 253 of an identifiable bit of DNA. In all non-pungent varieties, that space is taken by a T.

This result is just a beginning. Breeders will use the SNP to determine very early on, long before ripe fruits have been produced, whether those fruits will be hot or not. Researchers still don’t fully understand how plants make capsaicin. The SNP will help them home in on the genes responsible. And this blog will have taken the opportunity to use that nifty little icon up there on the right to indicate that we are serious and responsible members of the scientific blogosphere, dealing with peer-reviewed research in a serious and responsible manner.