- Survival seed bank in the news again. Must be Christmas.
- Turkish nibbles: wine, pictachios. That wine one will no doubt run and run.
- How to make sure nutrition gets a seat at the agricultural development table. And Danny breaks it down for ya.
- What leads to spurts in conservation effort? In situ only, but instructive.
- Sesame is big business in Ethiopia.
- Boffins find yet another bit of DNA that will save the world.
Chicken salad
Ultimately, researchers hope to get ancient DNA from well-dated bones. But “replicable DNA has been as rare as hen’s teeth,” Zeder says, thanks to contamination issues and tropical climes that degrade DNA. One team recently claimed to have mtDNA from an ancient Polynesian chicken bone in Chile — a dramatic find that would prove Polynesians reached the Americas before Columbus — but the find has been questioned as possibly contaminated (Science, 11 June 2010, p. 1344). Techniques are improving, however…
That cliff-hanger is a quote from a rather attractive Science spread enticingly entitled “In Search of the Wild Chicken,” reproduced a few days ago in an ILRI blog post. It’s a great story, but one wonders why there was not at least a mention of the recent paper in PLOSOne “Investigating the Global Dispersal of Chickens in Prehistory Using Ancient Mitochondrial DNA Signatures.” Those authors, after all, had 92 — count them!! — archaeological chicken bones to play with, and spun a convincing tale of “multiple prehistoric dispersals from a single Asian centre” from their analysis. Is there something of a rivalry developing in the highly competitive world of chicken DNA? Probably not, and no doubt we’ll be getting lots of cease and desist notices from the denizens of said world for even suggesting such a thing.
Nibbles: School genetics, Sigrid Heuer, Fungal sex, Rubber, Wine, James Scott, Sustainable diets meet, Food exhibit, EU and climate change
- Much may be made of a wheat gene-jockey, if he be caught young.
- Or rice gene-jockeys, for that matter.
- Lots of naughtiness going on in blue cheese.
- Hope those reprobate fungi are using sustainable Amazonian rubbers.
- Some wine with that naughty cheese?
- Learning Burmese, researching the deep history of crops. Meah.
- Start planning for the next sustainable diets symposium. Symposium is quite apt, isn’t it.
- Feast your eyes on Feast Your Eyes.
- European agriculture is totally prepared for this climate change whatsit.
Nibbles: Desert afforestation, Breadfruit, Sustainable tea, Biofortification, Cassava breeding, Wheat breeding, Ancient microbrewery
- The Sahara Forest Project: what could possibly go wrong?
- Maybe they should try breadfruit. Or avocados. Or ask this guy for advice.
- Not for all the sustainable tea in China!
- Or all the high-Fe pearl millet in India.
- Or all the wild chickens in South Asia.
- Cassava gets the genomic selection treatment. Maybe wheat too?
- Did someone mention beer?
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.