- A large-scale intervention to introduce orange sweet potato in rural Mozambique increases vitamin A intakes among children and women. Just 1 year of training worked just as well as a higher intensity intervention (3 years) in increasing OSP and vitamin A intake by younger children, older children and women, and decreasing prevalence of inadequate vitamin A intakes. OSP represented about half of all sweet potatoes consumed so I guess there was not complete replacement of local varieties.
- Composition of milk from minor dairy animals and buffalo breeds: a biodiversity perspective. There are significant interbreed and inter-species differences. Dromedary milk is closest to cow milk, mare and donkey milk maybe the healthiest, but moose milk is the one I’d like to try.
- Quality indicators for passport data in ex situ genebanks. That would be the genebanks in Eurisco. Verdict: not bad, but could do better. Most variation in quality is among institutes.
- Exploring the population genetics of genebank and historical landrace varieties. Old samples of dead seeds of 4 crops in Swedish museum jars more genetically variable than genebank accessions, but it’s not the genebank’s fault. And at least their seeds are still alive. Also no genetic correspondence between geographically matched museum and genebank samples.
- Combining chloroplast and nuclear microsatellites to investigate origin and dispersal of New World sweet potato landraces. Two areas of domestication, probably from a single wild progenitor species: lowland NW South America and lowland Central America/Caribbean. Genetic differences between these 2 genepools not accompanied by morphological differences, but then again nobody’s looked properly, and the current descriptors are useless anyway.
- The significance of African vegetables in ensuring food security for South Africa’s rural poor. Their huge potential is being thwarted by evil extensionists. Ok, but don’t we need to move beyond that?
- Comparative study on baobab fruit morphological variation between western and south-eastern Africa: opportunities for domestication. Hang on a minute, aren’t there a million factsheets about all this?
- Marriage exchanges, seed exchanges, and the dynamics of manioc diversity. Kinship structures determine cassava diversity patterns in Gabon. Matrilineal societies have more diversity.
- Interspecific hybridization of diploids and octoploids in strawberry. You get pentaploid and tetraploid plants.
- Genome wide association analyses for drought tolerance related traits in barley (Hordeum vulgare L.). Ok, deep breath. Over 200 accessions, both wild and cultivated, from 30 countries, so quite variable, but also structured. There were some QTLs that differed between dry and wet sites, but they didn’t explain much phenotypic variation, and they couldn’t be related to previous work. So GWA not much use, probably because of population structure. But couldn’t that have been predicted? And isn’t it possible to do something about structure in the analysis?
- Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Mostly proteobacteria. So my question is, could somehow attacking the symbionts form the basis of a pest management strategy?
- Projecting the effects of climate change on the distribution of maize races and their wild relatives in Mexico. Many races and wild relatives are predicted to shift in geographic distribution. Unless of course agronomy intervenes. Teocinte taxa should be collected.
Nibbles: Heirloom cattle, Saleb, Wheat protein, Dog domestication, Rooibos
- Why Highland Cattle? Because they look so cool, of course.
- It’s sahlib time!
- Australians find the extra gluten protein gene they need in Italian wheat.
- Where the hell was the dog domesticated?
- Rooibos tea is latest climate change victim.
Brainfood: Wild lentils, Palms, Iron, Soybean
- Field evaluation of resistance to Colletotrichum truncatum in Lens culinaris, Lens ervoides, and Lens ervoides × Lens culinaris derivatives. Wild relatives to the rescue.
- Annals of Botany Special Issue: Palm Biology. Way too much to summarize.
- Biofortification for combating ‘hidden hunger’ for iron. Reducing antinutrients is not the only, or indeed best, way to go.
- Archaeological Soybean (Glycine max) in East Asia: Does Size Matter? Yes, it does. Also age and location.
Nibbles: Cassava bad and good news, Soybean domestication, Bitter gourd, Drought, Agrobiodiversity job, Heirloom turkey, Eurisco, Artisanal wheat, MSB, Food culture
- FAO really very worried about cassava. Does it know that the CGIAR has the technology?
- In today’s “crop X domesticated earlier than usually thought” story, X = soybean.
- The Deccan Chronicle discovers the Bitter Gourd Project and likes what it sees.
- How to drought phenotype crops.
- The Christensen Fund has a position open for a Program Associate – Agrobiodiversity and Biocultural Landscapes. Damn, that sounds interesting.
- “But, miraculously, the Ghost Turkey survives.”
- Eurisco has a new website!
- Artisanal wheat on the rise. I love the quip in the caption.
- Vancouver ♥ Millennium Seed Bank, and fawns over faux royalty.
- Amaranth and pizza offer entreés to culture and politics.
Broadening the base for oilseed rape
Cabbages are the dogs of the crop world, trotted out whenever a point about diversity needs to be made. ((Photo by Paul Williams, found here.)) Brussels sprouts, Siberian kale, kohl rabi and good old boring Savoys are all members of a single species, Brassica oleracea, just as chihuahuas and great Danes are all Canis familiaris. If anything, though, brassicas are more complicated, because different species also interbreed moderately freely, much more so than the occasional doggie-style hybrid. One of the products of that promiscuity is the species known as oilseed rape, B. napus. Cabbage and turnip (B. rapa) apparently did their thing spontaneously “some centuries ago”. But they did so only a few times, and as a result the genetic diversity of oilseed rape is rather limited, depending as it does on the diversity present in those few original crosses between cabbage and turnip.
An obvious solution (obvious to plant breeders at any rate) is to reproduce those original crosses and resynthesize oilseed rape by arranging crosses between a more diverse bunch of cabbages and turnips, and indeed that is now old hat. Various programmes since the 1990s have created scores of “new” varieties of oilseed rape. The problem is that many of these have all the drawbacks of old oilseed rape, before the seeds were cleaned up of their nasty biochemicals and sanitized as canola. Merely crossing resynthesized oilseed with existing varieties in the hope of getting some of the better qualities of the new varieties into the improved cultivars is thus fraught with the risk of introducing bad stuff as well. The answer is backcrossing, breeding the offspring lines with their parents while selecting for the good qualities and against the bad qualities. As the authors of a new paper ((Girke, A., Schierholt, A., & Becker, H. (2011). Extending the rapeseed genepool with resynthesized Brassica napus L. I: Genetic diversity Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution DOI: 10.1007/s10722-011-9772-8)) note, this is
“a labor intensive approach and a long-term perspective, and appropriate resynthesized lines would have to be selected carefully.”
If you’re going to get into that, you may as well choose the parents for your breeding programme to be as different as possible from what you already have, to maximise the chances of finding something good and useful. Which is what the paper is all about. Andreas Girke and his colleagues measured the genetic distances within three distinct groups of oilseed rape and a collection of resynthesized varieties. They found, more or less as expected, that the spring, winter and Asian oilseed rapes were more similar to one another while the synthetic rapes were more diverse. Furthermore, and reassuringly, while the three groups tended to cluster as groups in a more detailed analyses of their DNA diversity, the synthetic rapes were roughly equally spread among the three clusters. The detailed analyses will give brassica breeders some of the information they need to breed better oilseed varieties. But a crucial question remains unanswered. How do offspring of the synthetic rapes crossed with established varieties perform in the field? The researchers crossed 44 synthetic rapes with two cultivars and planted out the offspring to measure how well they do and whether there is any relationship between the genetic distance between the two parents and performance in the field. But don’t get too excited; “The result of these studies will be presented in a separate publication.”
P.S. Many of the crops on which humanity depends are genetically interesting inter-specific hybrids, and re-doing the original, accidental crosses not only throws light on their evolution but also is of practical value to breeders. The whole business of resynthesized lines, which as far as I know began with CIMMYT’s synthetic wheat lines, is little known outside the esoteric world of plant breeding. It would be great to have a readable survey of the field, but I have not been able to find one. Anyone know of anything? And has resynthesis even been attempted for the banana? Answers, please.