Category: Featured

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?

On that “wild landrace” rice, Mike Jackson echoes a thought we’ve often had:

I wonder if the accession number(s) of Kasalath (presumably from the International Rice Genebank Collection – IRGC?) is cited in the full article. I have often argued with IRRI scientists of the need to cite the actual accession ‘provenance’ of the germplasm used in research and breeding, rather than just referring to this variety or that. There is a myth that a variety with the same name is genetically the same. And from our own evaluation of IR36 accessions (I think that was the variety, or maybe IR64) in the IRGC made in the 1990s there were at least six different types – even though the breeders stated, with confidence, that they knew what was the variety and what was not. I also hope that the actual lines in which this gene was discovered have been pure-lined and a sample entered into the IRGC – under a new accession number, of course!

I looked at the paper, and couldn’t spot anything resembling an accession number, but it is pretty dense.

Jacob riffs on the (pointless) opposition of policy and agriculture, with suggestions about the kind of agricultural research that is needed.

The point for agricultural research is that it is not enough to focus only on boosting output. Research choices have implications for access to food. For instance, in many cases breeding for small-scale producers (who consume most of what they grow) may be more effective for food security than breeding for commercial agriculture, even though the latter may be more effective in terms of productivity gains.

Antonia continues a metaphor, and asks for opinions on GCP’s RSS feeds.

It’s a new website, so still lots of construction debris flying and lying about, and gaping holes here and there, but we’re working on it as we go along… Will be interesting to hear the views of others on RSS.

Let her have it here.