- European are growing more vegetables. But how much of that is heirlooms?
- Canadian boffins grow wild potatoes for the leaves.
- Chinese wasp going to roast Italy’s chestnuts.
- The genetics of swine geography. Or is it the geography of swine genetics?
- The diversity of sauces.
- Cooking Flipper.
- Genetically engineered brewer’s yeast + cellulose-eating bacterium + biomass = methyl halides.
- Wild sheep runs wild in Cyrpus.
- “It can be planted in farms because it does not compete for resources with corn, coffee or bananas and acts as a nitrogen-fixing agent in the soil. The mpingo is also considered a good luck tree by the Chagga people who live on the slopes of the Mt. Kilimanjaro.”
Cats and dogs and maize: A Darwinian view
The Rough Guide To Evolution lists the entire content (with linky goodness) of the current early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences of the USA. As Mark Pallen notes, it “is chock full of articles on evolution from a recent colloquium”. Two that we’ll be reading over the weekend are:
- From wild animals to domestic pets, an evolutionary view of domestication, and
- Tracking footprints of maize domestication and evidence for a massive selective sweep on chromosome 10.
Who says we don’t know how to have fun round here?
Getting the aroma into rice
Researchers from Myanmar and Thailand have a paper in Field Crops Research ((Yi, M., Nwe, K., Vanavichit, A., Chai-arree, W., & Toojinda, T. (2009). Marker assisted backcross breeding to improve cooking quality traits in Myanmar rice cultivar Manawthukha. Field Crops Research. DOI: 10.1016/j.fcr.2009.05.006)) describing how they managed to get the prized gene for fragrance into a local rice variety which smelled, well, ordinary.
They started out with Manawthukha, a very well-liked but alas non-fragrant variety from Myanmar, and Basmati, which of course is the most famous of the fragrant rices, due to the badh2 allele. They did four cycles of back-crossing the latter with the former, always using progeny in which they could detect the DNA marker for the Basmati allele, and finally selfed the result. They then looked again for the tell-tale badh2 allele using molecular tools, hoping to find it in its homozygous state. Which they did, in 12 lines. Agronomic evaluation of these proved that they behaved essentially like Manawthukha, but were also nice and fragrant. QED. The authors say that the use of DNA markers to identify the gene for fragrancy right from the early cycles of selection considerably sped up the whole process of getting it into the Manawthukha genome.
Which sounds like a pretty good result. But I ran the paper past a rice expert of my acquaintance and he had an interesting question. Why did…
…Thai scientists collaborating with Myanmar choose to source the fragrance gene from Basmati, not from their own Khao Dawk Mali or other Thai aromatic varieties, nor from Myanmar’s own range of aromatic varieties? The alleles are identical in Basmati, Khao Dawk Mali and most of the Myanmar aromatics.
Any ideas?
But there’s more.
Some of the Myanmar aromatic varieties get their fragrance from a different gene, and one of them has twice the concentration of the main aromatic compound. Does that variety have both genes?
Good question. And no doubt there are people working on that. But I wonder whether other national programmes will be wanting to use that doubly fragrant Myanmar variety in their own efforts to have their own fragrant rice.
Nibbles: Communication, Chicken mutations, Endophytes, Earthworms
- DFID-supported collection of stories showing how information about new ways of doing things is communicated to rural people in developing countries includes some agrobiodiversity stuff.
- The genetic nature of the Pea-comb phenotype in chickens.
- Entomopathogenic fungus can become an endophyte in sorghum and confer protection from stem borer. Ain’t agrobiodiversity grand?
- Different earthworm species have different effects on the competition between four annual plants and their relative fecundity. Ain’t agrobiodiversity grand?
Nibbles: Tameness, Grass evolution, Baobab leaves, Cloning, Svalbard
- The roots of tameness.
- The roots of “grain endosperm texture.”
- The roots of drought tolerance in baobab.
- The roots of the difference between mitosis and meiosis.
- The roots of Svalbard.