- Stilton cheese from Stilton village? Illegal. h/t CAS-IP
- Is Indian agriculture heading for disaster?
- “If you read any economic, financial, or political analysis for 2010 that doesn’t mention the food shortage looming next year, throw it in the trash, as it is worthless“. Riiiiiight.
- Banana genome to be discussed.
- Uganda’s National Genebank online.
- GM crops to free third-world women from the drudgery of weeding! h/t reviews The Fruit Hunters (a book).
Corn genome
We’ve been almost silent on the massive effort this past week announcing the full sequence of the corn (maize) genome, mostly because we don’t actually have that much to contribute. Corn News Central this past week has been James and the Giant Corn; here’s his summary post. One of the things he linked to was a video of Patrick Schnable, one of the lead scientists, explaining what they did, how they did it and why they did it — at least in part — in under 4 minutes. I think it’s instructive.
I’m looking forward to reading about how the full sequence illuminates the domestication of corn, which I’ve read it does.
“It is silly to think of one solution”
Johan Schut pulled a folding knife from his hip pocket, inserted the tip into the base of a bright, crispy head of romaine lettuce and severed it in two.
“See there, the little brown specks with black legs?” He lifted one of the busy beasts onto the tip of his blade. “It’s a family of aphids. This is a non-resistant lettuce.”
Gotta love the New York Times ledes (as we ex-reptiles call them). This one certainly got me reading, and probably would have done even if I weren’t interested in “entrepreneurs and scientists [who] are trying to use all available techniques, including genetic modification, to improve agriculture around the world.”
It’s all there; cisgenesis, AFLP and MAS, arms races, private-public partnerships, options up the wazoo. Go Wageningen!
Nibbles: Climate, Money, Wine, Rice, Photosynthesis, Diversity
- Our friends at the Global Crop Diversity Trust have been busy:
- “Experts: Failure to focus on farming will undermine global climate agreement and increase hunger.” Er … what agreement?
- Oh, and we need more money, please.
- Tomorrow, US Congress briefed on soil microbiology and Vitis fermentation products, aka terroir.
- IRRI Boss wants to sequence all 109,000 rice accessions in genebank. Jeremy asks: “Then what?”
- Seeking C4 rice — and C3 sorghum. Good luck with that.
- Women grow food basket. In India.
It’s been a good week for the genomes
Cucumber. Tomato. Pig. Horse. A veritable cornucopia of crops and livestock. And from it will doubtless emerge fascinating scientific insights.
- “[H]orses have a newly forming part in their genetic make-up which shows the evolutionary process in action in a way that has not been seen before.”
- “[N]ew research applications and innovations at many points in the pork chain.”
- “[F]ar more is going on in the phloem than anybody … had previously expected.”
(The tomato is just an advanced map; no giant claims there, yet.)
This is really important science, no doubt about it. But I’d like to see a moratorium on claims that any of this is going to improve anybody’s food security. It hasn’t, yet. And personally I doubt that it ever will, but maybe that’s just me. I bought into the dream along with everyone else. Back in 1982 I agreed that cereals would fix their own nitrogen, that photosynthesis would be rejigged to become more efficient, that seed storage proteins would be made more completely nutritious.
The thing is, cereals don’t need to be engineered. It might help, but it hasn’t happened yet and in the meantime legumes are there to take up the slack. Changing C3 plants into C4 plants hasn’t happened yet either, and one has to wonder how much it will help poor farmers in the hot environments that make C4 more efficient. Seed storage proteins have been rejigged; Monsanto built a high-lysine maize, but it vanished more or less without trace because conventionally-bred high-lysine maizes are far cheaper and more attractive to the small-scale farmers who really need better nutrition. Nobody back then was too worried about drought or flooding; tolerance to submersion has now been engineered into rice and could be useful.
Overall, though, I wonder how much more progress might have been made had “ordinary” plant breeding been as easy and attractive as messing about with DNA directly. I also wonder how many surprises like this one are in store:
Indirect costs of a nontarget pathogen mitigate the direct benefits of a virus-resistant transgene in wild Cucurbita
Translation: Transgenic squashes — and almost all of them being grown commercially in the US and Mexico are transgenic — are protected from zucchini yellow mosaic virus. Plants that carry the resistance genes suffer considerably more wilt disease as a result. Hey ho, let’s see if we can add wilt resistance to the mix, shall we?