Category: Featured

Cindy Cox, one of the authors of the article described in a recent IFPRI article, encourages us to look beyond groundnuts, and trees, in thinking about perenniation.

I admit the first thing I saw in the IFPRI article was the picture and caption and I immediately slapped my forehead (groundnuts, perennials? doh!). Also, it is a shame that most readers seem to stop at trees and think this is yet another agroforestry article. There are indeed three perenniation strategies presented in the article, only one of which includes trees. Yes, trees use water but if you look at the picture in the article, the tree roots are busting their way through a hard soil layer to access resources that the maize roots would never have on their own. And there is no denying the significant increase in maize yields presented in this article due to perennials.

Good advice.

Cédric Jeanneret has a lot of questions on the IUCN-Microsoft partnership on Red Lists. Here’s a couple to be getting on with:

What and where are Microsoft’s GIS/spatial analysis know-how and capacity? No doubt its Computational Ecology and Environmental Science team could create an excellent geo-analysis tool in no time, but should we expect another, MS-proprietary geo-file standard? Probably not-so-proprietary, since Microsoft and ESRI are long-time partners, and certainly that partnership had something to do with the MS-IUCN collaboration. This then gives some sense to the new partnership. Most certainly a greater part of the SSC experts use ESRI software, so why not deal with ESRI directly and its arcgis.com platform? One reason could be that the ‘Red List’ is bigger than ESRI, so big so that only a corporation like MS could handle the data and queries.

Read them all.

Thanks everyone for the inspiration for us to showcase the importance of the genetic diversity of rice via the story behind the origin of the rice variety Kasalath.

You’re welcome, IRRI. And I’m sure Abed Chaudhury would join us in that.

Dr Sigrid Heuer of IRRI, the lead author of the rice paper we blogged about a few days back, and which elicited quite some discussion as regards the country of origin of the material identified as having high P use efficiency, has just contributed a long comment.

Thank you very much for the lively discussion on our paper and the origin of Kasalath. I learned a lot in the process and will follow up on this by genotyping the different Kasalath accessions that we have at IRRI and will also ask BRRI to do the same for accessions from Bangladesh.

As you may know from our previous publications on Pup1 (Chin et al 2011 Plant Physiol 156: 1202–1216; Chin et al 2010 Theor Appl Genet 120(6): 1073–1086), we find the tolerant Pup1 haplotype in many stress-adapted varieties of various origins and also in IRRI breeding lines developed for rainfed environments. We mention this in the paper. Whether the Pup1 locus/PSTOL1 has the same origin in all these accessions and whether the gene that we cloned from the one specific Kasalath sample is the “original” gene is not known and might be difficult to determine.

Do read the whole thing. Our thanks to Dr Heuer for taking the time to respond, and for following-up some of the suggestions arising from the discussion.

Milko points out, in a roundabout way, that as the Bari genebank fails to sow, so it may well fail to reap:

Do they have some catalogue of their seeds published somewhere? EURISCO never managed to get any data from them.

I would hope that they know what they’ve got, but does anyone else?