- Wild cassava relatives could be used for nutritional enhancement.
- “…quality improvement did not significantly reduce the genetic diversity of European and Chinese Brassica rapa cultivars.”
- Byelorussian agrobiodiversity bazaar.
Upstream blast
Blast is one of the worst rice diseases. I believe that, thanks to the breeders, most modern varieties have decent levels of resistance. After all, they can be used in varietal mixtures to protect traditional glutinous rice varieties from blast. 1 Unfortunately, much of this resistance is not durable, because the pathogen overcomes it with time.
For a long time, durable resistance has been known to exist in some Japanese varieties. But these varieties have not been useful for resistance breeding, as the resistant parent also brought along undesired characteristics: the offspring always had poor eating quality.
Shuichi Fukuoka and colleagues have found out why. They report in Science 2 that it is because of a tight genetic linkage. Resistance is conferred by the Pi21 locus, and:
The eating quality of plants carrying the elite cultivar’s chromosomal sequence from a point less than 2.4 kb downstream of the Pi21 locus was equivalent to that of the elite cultivar, and the plants showed a high level of blast resistance. In contrast, plants carrying the donor chromosomal sequence up to 37 kb downstream of the Pi21 locus showed inferior eating quality.
By crossing in just the right bit of the chromosome, and making sure that the neighboring areas do not tag along, resistance can now be transferred, without spoiling the taste.
“I find that no Plants were as yet collected for His Majestys Garden at Kew”
Smithsonian Magazine has a long, wonderful piece this month about the breadfruit — and Captain Bligh — in Jamaica. It’s by Caroline Alexander, who wrote a book on the famous mutiny, The Bounty. People forget that after the Bounty debacle in 1789, Bligh eventually, doggedly went back to the Pacific and completed his original mission of taking breadfruit to the Caribbean. In 1793, the Providence finally delivered its Tahitian cargo to Jamaica. Its descendants are still there. There’s a companion piece on cooking with breadfruit which includes Diana Ragone’s (of the Breadfruit Institute) recipe for her tasty breadfruit nachos. You can become a fan of the Breadfruit Institute on Facebook, which is how I got to the Smithsonian piece.
Nibbles: Gardening, Maple syrup, Farming and conservation, Late blight, Urban guerrilla, Bizarre produce, Russian food, Aquaculture, Heirloom apples, Turkish medicinal plants, Bee-eating hornets
- NY Botanical Garden launches summer Edible Garden celebration.
- Thingy for getting more syrup out of maples invented.
- Farmer floods his fields on purpose.
- Insights into tomato late-blight resistance. Do try and keep up!
- A very English guerrilla gardener.
- Pictures of weird fruits and vegetables.
- Russian starters. Uhm, I spot a trend.
- The future of aquaculture: giant robotic roaming cages.
- Saving California’s Sebastopol Gravenstein apple.
- “Zeytinburnu Medicinal Plant Garden, opened in 2005, is Turkey’s first and only medicinal plant garden.”
- Something else has it in for bees: Chinese hornets.
Nibbles: Seed travels, Carotenoids in cucumbers, Tea and hibiscus, Sea level rise, Tewolde on climate change, SPGRC
- After a year’s travel in search of seeds, Adam Forbes turns in his report.
- The genetics of orange-fleshed cucumbers elucidated.
- Tea and hibiscus booze.
- Video of honey harvesting.
- Maps of sea level rise. All somewhat unsatisfying, somehow.
- “Because we are poor, we shall suffer first but, ultimately, we shall all die together.”
- SADC Plant Genetic Resources Centre (SPGRC) director Paul Munyenyembe does the public awareness thing.