Will the UK’s National Fruit Collection survive?
Genebanks in the news
Are genebanks becoming sexy or something? In the past few days there have been:
- a VOA News piece on the USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit at the Geneva, NY campus of Cornell University, focusing on their world-famous apple collection;
- an article in Farm & Ranch Guide on the USDA’s Small Grains Collection at the University of Idaho’s Research and Extension Center at Aberdeed; and
- an article in Kauai Garden Island News on how to prepare breadfruit which resulted from a cook-off at the National Tropical Botanical Gardens, home of the world’s largest breadfruit collection.
Amidst all the recent media frenzy about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, it is good to see “normal” genebanks also featured in the news every once in a while.
In vino veritas
Thanks to Ola Westengen for contributing this post.
Serendipity seems to be the modus operandi of this great blog and so is the case with this post. On a trip last Sunday to look at this Etruscan world heritage site outside Cerveteri I stumbled into a Sagra dell’Uva –a town festival to celebrate the grape. I took the picture shown below and had some great Cerveteri Bianco Secco before walking on to the amazing Etruscan ruins. Then back in the office I came across a news item from the latest edition of Nature about the newly published sequence of the grapevine genome. The French-Italian consortium of researchers has read the half billion letter book of life of the variety Pinot Noir.
The draft sequence of the grapevine genome is the fourth one produced so far for flowering plants, the second for a woody species and the first for a fruit crop. Grapevine was selected because of its important place in the cultural heritage of humanity beginning during the Neolithic period.
The authors cite the Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote that Mediterranean people began to emerge from ignorance when they learnt to cultivate olives and grapes. I’m still ignorant, but it is starting to dawn on me that vine buffs must be some of the best perpetuators and celebrators of agricultural biodiversity — just take a look at the variety list on Wikipedia.
Vitamin C mystery solved, again
I blogged three months ago now about what was touted at the time as the final elucidation of the metabolic pathway by which plants make vitamin C. The piece in EurekAlert! which I quoted says:
UCLA and Dartmouth scientists have identified a crucial enzyme in plant vitamin C synthesis, which could lead to enhanced crops. The discovery now makes clear the entire 10-step process by which plants convert glucose into vitamin C, an important antioxidant in nature… It was not until 1998 that a biosynthetic pathway was proposed to explain how plants make this compound. Research confirmed much of the pathway, although one crucial missing link continued to baffle scientists and remained unknown until this new research.
So imagine my surprise when I read this today in FreshPlaza:
Agricultural scientists say they have uncovered the last big secret of vitamin C in plants, and it will create the chance to naturally breed healthier fruits. The breakthrough in understanding just how plants manufacture vitamin C will enable state science company Hortresearch to identify DNA markers for individual plants naturally producing high levels of the vitamin… Hortresearch’s science general manager, Dr Bruce Campbell said the team had isolated the last undiscovered enzyme and proved it controlled vitamin C in plants. The enzyme was the last step in a chain of research begun overseas nearly 80 years ago by scientist seeking to understand how plants produce vitamin C.
The research comes from New Zealand rather than the US, and was carried out on wild and cultivated kiwi fruit species with contrasting levels of vitamin C, rather than on Arabidopsis, but otherwise sounds as if it was aimed at solving pretty much the same problem. No way to tell from these brief summaries of the two pieces of work whether they came up with the same answer, though. That will take some more digging.
Anyway, it does seem likely that gene-jockeys will be falling over themselves all too soon trying to engineer a higher vitamin C apple, marula or whatever. Good luck to them. I’m no Luddite. But our friend Ola does have a point in his comment on my recent post on potatoes. Would it not maybe be easier and more cost effective to try to get people to eat foods which are naturally high in vitamin C?
Solanaceous information
There’s a global online monograph of the genus Solanum called Solanaceae Source. Each species treatment includes illustrations, a clickable list of specimens, links to molecular data and a dot distribution map (which mashes herbarium specimen locality data with Google Maps), among other things. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds the project as part of the Planetary Biodiversity Inventories mission. Collaborators are eligible for small awards in support of their contributions to the completion of the worldwide Solanum monograph.