Category: Featured

Peter Ballantyne sees a way to avoid Livestock Breed Database Hell:

For the ILRI part, we have been working on a more integrated approach that brings together all our ‘animal genetic resources’ sites into a unified AnGR knowledge space. Thus it would include at least DAGRIS, AGTR (which is training materials), and a related CDROM ‘virtual library.’ The problem is that each was built in isolation from the other, each has content buried inside a proprietary system (that we are moving to open), and none systematically and smartly (from a info architecture perspective) pull in the diverse content of the others .. and elsewhere. So we are moving to a more integrated set of services that share content (photos, documents etc) and allow for searching across etc. There’s also some work on ‘country’ views of DAGRIS. But it takes some time still!

Good luck, Peter!

Ford kindly points out that, in fixing atmospheric nitrogen, as in so much else, the devil is in the details.

High %N can be good, if you want fast release, but did you notice that 220880 produced less than 1/3 the biomass of 206492? If that’s what actually happens in the field, total N contribution would be much greater for 206492. (Similarly, high % protein isn’t enough, by itself, to convince me that some new crop species is worth developing. How much protein does it produce per hectare?)

Maybe Luigi will share his finder’s fee?

Yassir Islam of HarvestPlus clarifies the story of orange sweet potato adoption in Mozambique:

First, the paper clearly states that there was farmer adoption of OPS and substitution for white and yellow varieties: “An average of 77% of households…were considered to have adopted OSP for cultivation, representing a 26 percentage point increase in households growing sweet potatoes from the baseline….the increase in OSP intake was largely due to the substitution of OSP for white and yellow sweet potatoes.”

Read the equally important points two and three here.

Shelagh tells Luigi to chill about CWR in Europe:

In the PGR Secure project we are developing a comprehensive conservation strategy for European CWR and this will include a list of high priority species in need of conservation attention at regional level.

There’s a lot more to her comment, so read the whole thing. Oh and there’s a follow-up too.

Turns out we were ignorant. The CGIAR is doing a heap of work on cassava brown streak disease, as Clair Hershey informed us.

There are several major projects on breeding for resistance, e.g., ”Biotechnology applications to combat cbsd” coordinated by IITA; “Cassava genomics: bridging the gap between sequence and breeding application” funded by Gates; and an ongoing major effort in Uganda to look for resistance in landraces and bred varieties. Also, there is a new project proposal from East Africa to search for resistance in Manihot wild species. This is under review so details aren’t yet available, but hopefully it will be funded.

Which is great. But who knew?