Category: Breeding

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Another silver bullet?

The discovery of an enzyme which sits at a crucial step on the metabolic journey from glucose to that important anti-oxidant, vitamin C, opens the way for the kind of silver bullet thinking we have previously been somewhat critical of on this blog. Or it may not. We’ll see.

One of the researchers says:

We now have two strategies to provide enhanced protection against oxidative damage: Stimulate the endogenous activity of the identified enzyme or engineer transgenic plants which overexpress the gene that encodes the enzyme.

But I wonder whether this discovery will also allow the rapid evaluation of cultivars for vitamin C content?

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Cotton genetic resources conserved in Texas

You thought Lubbock, Texas was only famous as the birthplace of Buddy Holly? Think again. It’s a veritable hothouse of cotton genetic resources conservation and use. Not much of what you might call news in the Eurekalert piece, but interesting nonetheless. For example, did you know that there are three international cotton germplasm collections, in Lubbock, France and Uzbekistan? Or that breeders are scouring wild cottons for the genes to make the crop more environmentally friendly?

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Potato foundation story

You may remember a post a few weeks back on the origins of potato late blight. Now comes news of a DNA study which looked at the origin of the European potato itself.

The spud was introduced into Europe via the Canary Islands in the mid-16th century. The authors of the study compared landraces currently grown in the Canaries, which are thought to be the descendents of those early introductions, with material from Chile and the Andes. There has long been controversy about whether European varieties trace their origins to one or the other of these places.

It turns out the answer is probably both: there were

“multiple early introductions of both Andean and Chilean germplasm to the Canary Islands and to Europe,” said Dr. David Spooner, co-author of the Crop Science study.

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Cassava in Africa

Cassava has a big problem in Africa, and it is called brown streak virus. A virulent strain is spreading rapidly across eastern and southern Africa from a beachhead in Zanzibar, devastating the tubers but leaving the leaves looking healthy, which means farmers don’t realize anything is wrong until it is too late. Scientists from the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) have been studying the virus and have developed resistant varieties, by conventional breeding, and these are finding their way to farmers.

There’s a short SciDev piece about brown streak virus which points to a longer, very readable New Scientist article. I know we’re talking about a very serious problem and a very nice solution based on the exploitation of agricultural biodiversity, but normally I wouldn’t blog about this sort of thing, simply because there are so many similar examples out there. But I was inspired to do so on this occasion because I also spotted an article in a Ugandan newspaper (via the wonderful allAfrica.com) which talks about the resistant varieties and efforts to get sufficient planting material of these cultivars into the hands of farmers in a particular district. It’s always nice to see “big” stories from international news sources reflected in the local media.

Cassava is an important constituent of Kinshasa’s urban gardens, whose role in providing nutrition, especially to children, is so well described in a Christian Science Monitor article today. Let’s hope brown streak virus doesn’t reach Kinshasa, but if it does the resistant varieties would find a ready means of dissemination through a project which “organized a team of local volunteers called “Mama Bongisa” (‘mom improver’) to teach mothers in some … impoverished neighborhoods about nutrition and farming.”

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Undoing millennia of barley selection

Generations of beer-loving farmers have bred seed dormancy almost entirely out of barley, so that the grains will readily germinate in the malthouse. Unfortunately, that means that malting varieties are sometimes prone to jumping the gun and sprouting before harvest, while the crop is still standing in the field. That means that the grain cannot be used to make beer. Not a good thing.

Fortunately, a PhD student in Australia, a land well known for its love of the amber nectar, has compared the barley genome with that of Arabidopsis and identified some bits which may contain previously unknown dormancy genes. Should a negative effect on pre-harvest sprouting be confirmed in the field – and trials are under way – breeders could use markers for these genes to help them select genotypes which will only sprout where it would do the most good: in the maltings.