Category: Breeding

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Thai rice on the genebank menu

158826661 3Cb29Defdd M There was a slightly odd article at Seed Magazine a little while back on Thailand’s efforts to conserve almost extinct varieties of rice in its genebank. Odd because while the story is familiar enough in this kind of piece, the details are slightly confused (or confusing). But no matter, that’s probably only of concern to a pedant like me. The rest of you won’t worry about statements like “farmers across Asia once grew more than 100 varieties of rice, but now that number is down to only 20 or 30 of the most productive types”. Instead, you’ll be thrilled to know that the Thai national collection houses nearly 24,000 varieties, 17,000 of which “are in danger of dying out because they are no longer grown by Thai farmers”. That’s great because SINGER, a window on the world of genebank accessions, lists only 5982 samples from Thailand. Maybe one of those is “the fragrant Pin Kaew variety that was named the best rice in the world at a competition in 1966 but which has since disappeared, having lost out to more productive varieties”.

flickr photo by Stef Noble used under a Creative Commons license. Purple Sticky Rice is rare, but not that rare.

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Rice stories

The BBC World Service is broadcasting a series of four programmes on the rice cultures of Asia, called Rice Bowl Tales. Starts 28 February, but if you miss it, it seems like the series has already aired on Radio National, and if you follow the link I’ve just given, you should be able to listen online or download audio files.

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Crop wild relatives underused

Are crop wild relatives (CWR) more trouble than they’re worth? There are certainly significant challenges involved in including them in breeding programmes, but you’d have thought that between the new molecular tools that are now out there, the greater numbers of CWR accessions in genebanks, and all the information about how useful CWRs can be, breeders would be falling over themselves to make those kinky inter-specific crosses. Well, according to a major review by our friends at Bioversity International (the outfit formerly known as the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute), the use of CWRs in breeding programmes has been steadily increasing in the past 20 years, but probably not as much as might have been expected. There’s been a number of papers recently on CWRs. This paper, also from Bioversity, looks at in situ conservation of CWR. Check out this for a discussion on the definition of the term, and, from some of the same people, there’s this overview of conservation and use of CWR, using a specific example. Here’s an example of conservation assessment and priority-setting for the wild relatives of the peanut. For a discussion of the possible effects of climate change on these species, see this.

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Breeding info

Getting the new issue of CropBiotech Update in my inbox today, and noticing at least a couple of crop improvement items I would like to blog about at some stage, prompted a reflection on sources of information on the use of agricultural biodiversity in breeding.

Produced by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA), you can get CropBiotech Update delivered by email once a week or check out the website here (where you can subscribe to an RSS feed or sign up for the email alerts). FAO also has a news service in biotechnology, which you can check out here. You can sign up for monthly email alerts, but I couldn’t see any RSS feeds, unfortunately.

Somewhat broader than either of these, but with some overlap, is Plant Breeding News, sponsored by FAO and Cornell University. You can sign up to the email alerts, consult the archives and learn how to contribute here. BIO-IPR is an irregular listserver produced by GRAIN. It focuses on PGR policy issues, and you can find out more about it here.

Finally, I just wanted to mention an example of a national-level agricultural research newsletter which provides information on breeding programmes, DIDINET News from the National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI) in Papua New Guinea. DIDINET stands for “Didiman/Didimeri Network” or a network for scientists and other stakeholders in the agriculture sector. There must be lots of other examples of such national newsletters. I wonder if someone has compiled a list.

And of course I haven’t mentioned the various ways the CGIAR Centres disseminate information about crop breeding, such as this one, for example. But maybe Jeremy will say something about that. He knows more about it than I do.

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Accidental cross reveals salt-tolerant wheat genes

Scientists at the Australian CSIRO Plant Industry (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) have discovered two genes, called Nax1 and Nax2, that could be used to develop salt-tolerant wheats. Nax1 exudes sodium (Na, geddit?) from the leaves while Nax2 excludes it from the roots. The two genes appear to come from an ancient type of wheat, Triticum monococcum, that was accidentally crossed into a modern durum wheat line about 35 years ago. Rana Munns, the team leader, said the discovery was an amazing stroke of luck.

We screened a hundred durum wheats from the Australian Winter Cereals Collection at Tamworth, which contains tens of thousands of wheat types. Highlighting the fact that the science of plant breeding sometimes relies on an element of good fortune, we were lucky to find the durum variety with the ancient genes straight away, otherwise we might have been looking for years.

The search was motivated by the knowledge that 6% of the world’s arable areas are affected by salinity.

Personally, of course, I’d like to know more about that accidental cross that put T. monococcum genes into a modern bread wheat, but details are not forthcoming.

Article: Physiological Characterisation of Two Genes for Na+ Exclusion in Durum Wheat: Nax1 and Nax2.