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.
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.
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.
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.
The diverse crops of Kenya
I’ll be away for about a week so blogging might be a bit light, but I couldn’t resist mentioning the following four stories that were in the print edition of the Daily Nation this morning before leaving:
- A new climbing bean variety developed by the University of Nairobi and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute has been released and will be ready for commercial production by June.
- Coconut vendors in Mombasa are set to have access to a new technology (developed by FAO in collaboration with the Intermediate Technology Development Institute) for keeping coconut juice fresh for up to 3 weeks.
- The vice-chairman of the Rift Valley branch of the Kenya Horticultural Society asked local universities to start breeding new flower varieties rather than using material from the Netherlands and Israel.
- A group of Nyeri farmers have started selling their coffee directly to international dealers rather than through the traditional central auction system.
I thought the range of these articles really gave an good impression of the great variety of Kenyan agriculture and agricultural research.
See you again soon…