Category: Climate change

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Help researchers get their priorities right

Would you like to influence the future direction of research on roots, tubers and bananas? Course you would. And now you can, thanks to a priority setting exercise being carried out by the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas. The ProMusa website has the full details: researchers

are … looking beyond yields to estimate the impact on poverty, health, gender equity and environmental sustainability.

It starts with mapping to locate the places where “research has the greatest potential to alleviate poverty and increase food security”.

The top constraints in these target areas will then be matched with research options. The impact, over the next 20 years, of these research options will be assessed using different methods, depending on the indicator, and the findings will be used to guide research investment decisions.

So now you know, and you have no excuse.

If your interest is bananas and plantains, then head on over to the ProMusa page that will guide you to a survey in English, French and Spanish. For other crops – but inexplicably not bananas nor the “minor” roots and tubers – the RTB website is the place to go.

Anyone for taro?

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Nibbles: School genetics, Sigrid Heuer, Fungal sex, Rubber, Wine, James Scott, Sustainable diets meet, Food exhibit, EU and climate change

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Nibbles: Old rice, New quinoa, Fishy stuff, Cropland landscapes, Forest landscapes, Old seed, Superdomestication, Intensification

  • Youth compiles list of rare and extinct rice varieties of Assam. Maybe he should look at weedy rice too?
  • Meanwhile, American farmers are learning to grow quinoa, probably including some rare varieties.
  • The smelliest fish in the world. No traceability needed for that one, I guess.
  • Cropland getting mapped. Presumably including the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS). Help needed by both, by the way.
  • Follow the forest discussions at COP18. High on the agenda: what is a landscape? It’s what you study when you’re being holistic, no? Anyway, there’s got to be a connection to the previous links.
  • Boffins find a genetic marker for old seed. Will need to Brainfood this one.
  • Pat Heslop-Harrison breaks down superdomestication for you.
  • SRI gets a scaling up. What could possibly go wrong?
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Nibbles: Fungi, Fireblight, Flood Relief, Irrational Ghanaian men, Symposium, Dust Bowl Blues, SRI, Brazil’s agro-policy

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Bread wheat genome rises

It’s a good day for cereal genomes. Nature offers both bread wheat and barley, and they’re both open access. That’s great; you can read them yourself and draw your own conclusions. Nature’s commentary on the matter, however, will set you back $18, which seems fair enough. The crucial points are:

  • The wheat genome is huge — three sets of chromosomes derived from three different ancestors — and complex. So this isn’t actually a complete sequence.
  • It is, however, a great scaffold on which to build a more detailed sequence, using additional techniques.
  • The sequence has already revealed that members of some gene families have been lost since the ancestral hybridisation, while others, notably those involved in specific areas of plant metabolism and growth, have expanded.
  • The best wheat yields can exceed 12 tonnes per hectare; the global average is more like 2 t/ha, and that is likely to be undermined by climate change. Will the genome help breeding efforts? Some people clearly hope so.

Barley was a relatively simple challenge, just one set of chromosomes, and smallish ones at that. And barley is already much more tolerant of physical stresses than many other cereals. So rather than looking to the genome for help in breeding better barley (though that is surely on the cards) researchers ask how barley’s genes help it to be so tolerant, and then use the answers to improve other cereals.