You can’t keep a good man down. Dr Ken Street, who may or may not be the Indiana Jones of agriculture, has been explaining why Australia’s Grains and Development Corporation (GRDC) has given $5 million to the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Part of GRDC’s contribution is earmarked for Central Asia and the Caucasus, where wheat and other cereals were domesticated and where there are still valuable genetic resources. The Trust will help to conserve material collected in those regions, which Street says has already demonstrated resistance to three different kinds of wheat rust: leaf, yellow and stripe. GRDC is funded by a levy on Australian cereal farmers, and the genetic resources supported by the Trust will be freely available to all researchers. So, as Street neatly sums up: “the benefit to Australia is access to genes that could solve many current production constraints”.
Synthetic wheat
Reconstructing bread wheat introduces novel genetic diversity.
One up, one down
Following on from Luigi’s post a month or so back about the probable return of the chestnut to American woods, two stories, on consecutive days, from the Christian Science Monitor. One gives more information about the complex breeding programme that involves Chinese chestnuts, resistant American trees and lots of painstaking crosses to produce blight-resistant chestnuts. That work has been going on since the early 1980s, and may now be close to complete. A few days earlier, the paper reported on the threat to the Eastern Hemlock, a woolly bug, originally from East Asia. Adelges tsugae has been slowly spreading across the US, where the only hope seems to be a decent cold winter. The fear is that the Eastern Hemlock will go the same way as the Carolina Hemlock, which once shared the forests with the American chestnut and which, experts fear, could now be eaten out of existence.
PVP in SADC
An update on plant variety protection in southern Africa.
Seed sleuth
There’s a glowing portrait of Ken Street, a plant hunter, in the Sydney Morning Herald. Street works with ICARDA, the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, based in Aleppo, Syria and spends much his time in the wilds of central Asia, searching out crop diversity. The piece is a bit gushy for my taste, and I’m not sure I agree with everything Street is quoted as saying. “We have been eating genetically modified organisms for 10,000 years” turns the phrase “genetically modified organisms” into meaningless guff. But he does make some good points about the amount of diversity that survives — for now — in places like Armenia and Tajikistan. If you want a glimpse into the life of a man they call “an agricultural Indiana Jones,” that’s what you’ll get.
Luigi unavailable for comment.