Category: Featured

Mark Nesbitt knows who the Director of Agriculture is Tanzania was in 1934:

The sorghum collection – all 956 accessions – was acquired by J.D. Snowden while working on his 1936 book (still in print!) “Cultivated Races of Sorghum”. It’s a perfect example of a collection that 20 years ago would have seemed useless (old seeds, mostly dead) but thanks to new techniques (DNA analysis) suddenly looks very interesting as a record of landrace distribution before the Green Revolution.

So, any gene jockeys out there interested in extracting DNA from old seeds? Just for information, there are 1058 sorghum accessions from Tanzania in Genesys. How much can it cost to run a bunch of microsatellites on 2,000 samples?

Peterson Wambugu misses the Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter and doesn’t care who knows it:

We are still mourning the death of PGRN. What became of efforts to resurrect it which had been initiated about 2 years ago. The Newsletter was a vital source of information on genetic resources. We really miss it.

So how about it, guys? How are those plans for resurrection going?

On the lack of varieties selected to perform well under organic agriculture, David Tribe (aka GMO Pundit) asks:

Why not use the seed industry varieties already on the market? There plenty of money invested there. Why do you need to reinvent the wheel?

He clearly has other things on his mind.

In reference to the organic meta-analysis, Matthew asks:

What about crop genetics?? I read the actual Nature piece and no mention of seed or breeding.
Organic vs Conventional studies are often flawed in that they ignore that most organic farmers are using seed bred for conventional systems … The first axiom of breeding is to breed in area of intended use, and organic environments are quite different than conventional. Research from Washington State University shows evidence that when organic farmers used wheat seed that had been selected in organic systems for multiple generations there is as much as 20% increase in wheat yields, compared to when they plant conventional seed.

I think this is the research referred to.

Marleen Cobben gives more details on her fascinating model:

The results from our model suggest that the spatial process of range shifting under climate change can have a big impact on the genetic composition of new populations. This is because the individuals arriving first in a new climatically suitable natural area, have a competitive advantage (in numbers) over individuals arriving later. So even if these latter individuals are better adapted to the local conditions, adaptation of the population takes a while because there’s initially so little to select for. No news thus far I’d say. The problem is, that this ‘while’ is fairly long compared to the predicted rate of temperature increase.

And there’s a lot more, all of it interesting. Have a look.