Category: Featured

kctomato — obviously a made-up name — takes a philosophical approach to the problem of plant breeding and intellectual property rights:

One man sees bricks and builds walls for borders and prisons, another sees bricks and builds walls for schools and hospitals.

Limiting genes and thus diversity through utility patents in particular may be keeping some from doing more than what another be holding onto.

But does that fix the problem?

Luigi is using a page here to solicit comments on a document: Technical appraisal of strategic approaches to large-scale germplasm evaluation. And some of the commenters are less than enthralled. Here’s Major Goodman:

[T]he glaring failure here is not running almost any of these ideas past private plant breeders who have tried to make use of these technologies, mostly to no avail. Nor do I see input from folks who have tried to maintain and study germplasm accessions, who could at least comment on some of the fieldwork feasibility. This seems to be an in-house, pat yourself on the back effort by and for NGS-enthralled scientists. In fact, I see almost no input by any real plant breeder or germplasm expert.

Will that stop the project dead? Let us know what you think.

A vote for ISO certification of genebanks from Michael:

I can’t believe there is even a debate about the usefulness of genebank certification. Certification is not a costly distraction or a mere prestige thing.

And another one from Cedric:

The process leading to an official certification is an institutional exercise of the ‘good’ kind. In-house certification is maybe cheaper and more flexible/less rigid (see FB discussion), but it is not the point of this somewhat cumbersome procedure.

Add your own!

Ian Dawson has a bone to pick with the authors of a study on barley domestication which we included in a recent Brainfood:

The main point is… properly geo-referenced samples give so much more insight in a paper such as this…

The original paper is in PNAS: “Tibet is one of the centers of domestication of cultivated barley.” So maybe it isn’t after all? Let the debate begin.

Richard Hardwick points us to the full text (PDF, 23 pages) of that “[w]eird statement on genetic resources from EU Commission” we mentioned in a recent Nibble.

I think its from the people who promised “to explore the scope for developing a strategy for the conservation of genetic diversity.”

Right. So who’s going to read it for us?