Embrapa gets NYTimes write-up. Its genebanks unavailable for comment.
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More rice terrace wonders
Also at Yunnan Agricultural University I got a brief glimpse of some absolutely fascinating research from the Yuanyang rice terraces, which rival those of Banaue in age and extent. Professor Wang Yunyue, who just happens to be the wife of Professor Zhu, has been studying the agriculture of the Hani people who have cultivated the terraces for at least 1300 years. Modern hybrids have been introduced from time to time, but the Hani always abandon them after a couple of years, usually because they are no longer resistant to the diseases they were brought in to combat. Instead, the Hani continue to grow their traditional landraces.
Starch and human diversity
Human diversity and agricultural biodiversity interact. The variation that exists between and within crops and livestock products in nutritional content is to some extent matched by — and indeed there is evidence that in some cases it has driven — genetic variation between and within the human populations that make use of them. We’ve blogged about this with regard to lactose intolerance and predisposition to iron deficiency. Now comes a study ((Perry, George H. et al. (2007) Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation. Nature Genetics. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ng2123.)) linking variation among human populations in the number of copies of the amylase gene with the amount of starch in their diet ((I learned about it via a post in Carl Zimmer’s blog The Loom, in which he also talks about a couple of other cases of multiple copies of a gene building up in a genome.))
Bigger not necessarily better in agrobiodiversity
Jeremy says we sound like a broken record on the lack of agricultural thinking in biodiversity circles at times, and he’s right of course. More charitably, it could be thought of as judicious use of a leitmotif. In which case another one would certainly be the unfortunate dearth of information on nutritional composition at the variety or accession level, certainly as compared to morphological and agronomic information. The reason for that is that genetic resources scientists and breeders have been more interested in things like yield and disease resistance. That’s had consequences.
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