A couple of very different stories about drought resistance in the media today. The first one describes – albeit very briefly – how Italian breeders have come up with a new tomato variety that needs about a quarter of the water of thirstier types. It’s not clear from the article, but I got the impression genetic modification was involved, which would be odd as some wild tomato species are found in deserts! So I did a bit of snooping on the website of ENEA, the institute where the research was done, and I found a press release from a few days back which suggests (in Italian) that perhaps it was not genetic transformation but rather functional genomics that was involved. The second piece tells us how a combination of experimental and observational work by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientists in Panama is suggesting that even in the humid tropics it is drought which is limiting the distribution of many species. As climate change is expected to manifest itself primarily though shifts in rainfall patterns in the tropics, this means that dramatic changes are likely in the composition of plant communities in Central America.
Blogging fruit
I’ve just come across The Fruit Blog, in which The Evil Fruit Lord discusses all things pomological (and nuts too). There’s a good set of links, and the blog has an RSS feed, which is going straight into my reader.
Dogs That Changed The World
Controlling self-pollination
Not a day passes, it seems, without news of yet another important gene being identified and mapped. Not long after geneticists uncovered the trigger for flowering, we now have news that researchers at Cornell are close to tracking down the genes that regulate a plant’s ability to self-pollinate. Good news for breeders everywhere.
Flowering trigger uncovered
Some clever genetic manipulation has led scientists to identify the chemical that allows daylength to trigger flowering in plants – all plants, it looks like. It is the protein produced by the gene called Flowering Locus T, or FT. This means that crop beeders will now have a better shot at developing varieties which will flower at different latitudes, useful as climate zones shift due to climate change.