Dr Sandra Knapp of the Botany Department of the Natural History Museum in London was interviewed by the BBC’s Today Programme this morning about the tomato genome, which of course has been all over the news lately. You can hear her 54:20 minutes in, or, if that doesn’t work, here. Particularly cool that she squeezes in a mention of the wild relative that was also sequenced.
Nibbles: GIBF, Identifiers, Farming animals, Geomedicine, Seed saving, Seeds of Success, CWRs, CORA 2012, Sourdough culture bank, Phenology, Wild Coffea, Cassava conference, Condiments, Gulf truffles, Cashew nut, Home gardens, Tea, Bacterial diversity
- GIBF taxonomy is broken. We’re doomed. No, but it can be fixed. Phew.
- Maybe start with a unique identifier for taxonomists? Followed by one for genebank accessions… Yeah. Right.
- Domesticating animals won’t save them. And more on the commodification of wildlife. Is that even a word?
- Geomedicine is here. Can geonutrition be far behind? We’re going to need better maps, though.
- Saving heirlooms, one bright student at a time.
- “Botanists Make Much Use of Time.” If you can get beyond the title, there’s another, quite different, but again quite nice, seed saving story on page 3.
- “Why aren’t these plants the poster children [for plant conservation]?” You tell me.
- Or, instead of doing something about it, as above, we could have a week of Collective Rice Action 2012.
- You can park your sourdough here, sir.
- How Thoreau is helping boffins monitor phenology. But there’s another way too.
- “She drinks coffee. She farms coffee. She studies coffee.” Wild coffee.
- Massive meet on the Rambo Root. Very soon, in Uganda.
- Ketchup is from China? Riiiight. Whatever, who cares, we have the genome!
- And in other news, there are truffles in Qatar. But maybe not for long.
- The weirdness of cashews.
- The normalcy of home gardens as a source of food security — in Indonesia.
- Ok, then, the weirdness of oolong tea.
- Aha, gotcha, the normalcy of office bacterial floras! Eh? No, wait…
Brainfood: Healthy berries, Maghrebi arpicots, Visualizing DNA relationships, Below-ground plant diversity, European apples, Rice storage, Barley movement
- Antiglycation activity of Vaccinium spp. (Ericaceae) from the Sam Vander Kloet collection for the treatment of type II diabetes. The tropical ones are better. But who is Sam Vander Kloet, I hear you ask?
- Genetic diversity and differentiation of grafted and seed propagated apricot (Prunus armeniaca L.) in the Maghreb region. Well, there really isn’t much.
- Trees and/or networks to display intraspecific DNA sequence variation? And.
- Below-ground plant species richness: new insights from DNA-based methods. Theory says it will be higher than above-ground richness.
- New Insight into the History of Domesticated Apple: Secondary Contribution of the European Wild Apple to the Genome of Cultivated Varieties. No genetic bottleneck, and lots of contribution from local wild relative, making European apples closer to that than to Central Asian ancestor.
- Viability of Oryza sativa L. seeds stored under genebank conditions for up to 30 years. Genebanks work.
- Barrier analysis detected genetic discontinuity among Ethiopian barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) landraces due to landscape and human mobility on gene flow. Barriers to human movement, rather than mere distance, lead to genetic differentiation in barley.
Nibbles: Rio, Livestock & crops, Rice restored, Asparagus trials, Pigeonpea DNA, Tomato taste, Liquorice, Palm pest
- The UK is fully on board for Rio+20 to “prioritize sustainable agriculture”.
- Maybe they saw ILRI’s number on mixed crops and livestock?
- The Japanese say that restoring the surrounding ecosystem is what restored rice production after last year’s tsunami. So they will support the UK?
- Amateur trials genebank’s asparagus varieties. I got a great bean that way.
- AoBblog catches up with the pigeonpea priority problem.
- “‘We now know exactly what we need to do to fix the broken tomato,’ said Harry Klee of the University of Florida.” You couldn’t make this science knows how stuff up.
- A new use for liquorice: treating type 2 diabetes.
- Something is eating the palms of Antigua, including the coconut palms. I’m no expert, but the symptoms look a lot like the work of the red palm weevil, our Roman palm disaster.
Brothers in farms
Jeremy’s recent piece of detective work with the current edition of the Garden Seed Inventory, coming hot on the heels of my own piece on how diversity in French wheat has changed during the past hundred years, reminded me of a post of ours a couple of years back that could now bear revisiting. It was about a paper that had re-analyzed historical data from vegetable seed catalogues old and new to suggest that maybe the metanarrative of genetic erosion had been overdone:
If the meaning of diversity is linked to the survival of ancient varieties, then the lessons of the twentieth century are grim. If it refers instead to the multiplicity of present choices available to breeders, then the story is more hopeful. Perhaps the most accurate measure of diversity would be found in a comparative DNA analysis of equal random samples of old and new varieties, work that remains to be done.
The alleged grounds for hopefulness are that Drs Heald and Chapman, the authors, found 7100 varieties in 2004 catalogues, “only 2 percent fewer than one hundred years earlier. By this measure, consumers of seeds have seen almost no loss of overall varietal diversity”. Well of course that French wheat work is indeed as close as we’re likely to get to the “DNA analysis of equal random samples of old and new varieties.” And, alas, it shows what Jeremy said at the time was all too possible, and that is that genetic diversity can go down even when varietal diversity, meaning the number of cultivars of a crop, goes up. Grim after all.
Trawling seed catalogues is good fun, and can give you some clues as to what genetic erosion may be happening, but in the end it is diversity at the genetic level that really counts, let’s remember that. The geneticist JBS Haldane famously said that he would lay down his life for two of his brothers or eight of his cousins. That’s just a striking way of saying that you’re more closely related to your brother than to your cousin. The corollary of that is that there’s more genetic diversity in a group of cousins than in a group featuring the same, or indeed even a greater, number of brothers.
We still don’t know if those 7100 varieties in the 2004 catalogues are more brothers or cousins, but, if French wheat is anything to go by, the former is more likely. ((Though it need not be so.)) You may think you have a “multiplicity of present choices”, but if in fact you only have brothers to choose from, you could be forgiven for the temptation to trade a whole bunch of them for a cousin or two.
Assuming you can get hold of them, that is.