- Never thought I’d see the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Psychology Today, yet here we are.
- The Pacific’s regional genebank is set for more work on lesser-known crops. Too bad most of them won’t be able to go to Svalbard.
- How to make a genebank beautiful as well as sustainable.
- Australia has a rice genebank. For some reason.
- Bangladesh gets a new genebank. Could have sworn it already had one.
- Mutants need a genebank too.
- And inoculants.
- Community-level genebanks have their place too. Though probably not for mutants.
- As long as the farmers get a benefit, of course.
- Tricot is a good way of evaluating all that stuff in genebanks.
- But you should also genotype it.
- Why bother with all this? Andreas Volz has a nice explanation.
- Genetic diversity is all very good, but don’t forget to intercrop.
- Which includes agroforestry.
- For a more varied diet.
- And a better world economy.
- And a more sustainable food system.
Brainfood: Seed quantity, Seed quality, Seed testing, Seed sampling, Cryo review, Potato diversity, Coconut cryo, Apple genebanks, Pear vulnerability, Pear restoration, Celebrity conservation, Indigenous rematriation, Farmers’ Rights
- Optimizing the accession-level quantity of seeds to put into storage to minimize seed (gene)bank regeneration or re-collection. = [nvt × 3]+[nd × (y × x)]+ qmin if you must know.
- A pragmatic protocol for seed viability monitoring in ex situ plant genebanks. Formulas are good, but you need some flexibility too.
- A power analysis for detecting aging of dry-stored soybean seeds: Germination versus RNA integrity assessments. Germination testing is good, but RNA integrity assessment is better, especially early on in storage.
- Sampling strategies for genotyping common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) Genebank accessions with DArTseq: a comparison of single plants, multiple plants, and DNA pools. Pool the DNA from 25 plants for best results. They don’t even have to be alive :)
- Plant Cryopreservation: Principles, Applications, and Challenges of Banking Plant Diversity at Ultralow Temperatures. No seeds? No problem. Still a lot of research needed though.
- Potato soup: analysis of cultivated potato gene bank populations reveals high diversity and little structure. This should help figuring out what to put in cryo, I guess.
- Developing new in vitro micropropagation and cryopreservation techniques in coconut. A little less research needed.
- SNP genotyping Dutch heritage apple cultivars allows for germplasm characterization, curation, and pedigree reconstruction using genotypic data from multiple collection sites across the world. Now do coconuts.
- Vulnerability of pear (Pyrus) genetic resources in the U.S. It’s moderate to high. No word on what the vulnerability of coconut is.
- First plant conservation translocation in Armenia: restoring globally threatened wild pear populations. A little less vulnerable?
- Designing celebrity-endorsed behavioral interventions in conservation. I’d like to get a celebrity to endorse coconut cryoconservation. Mr Freeze?
- The seeds are coming home: a rising movement for Indigenous seed rematriation in the United States. Makes all the formulas and testing and gadgets worthwhile.
- Farmers’ Rights in the Plant Treaty: interrelations and recent interactions with other international regimes and processes. Will require all those formulas and testing and gadgets.
Brainfood: Ag research ROI, CGIAR & climate change, Crop species diversity, Training plant breeders, AI & plant breeding, Wheat breeding review, Wheat landraces, CIMMYT wheat breeding, Wheat D genome, Forages pre-breeding, Impact of new varieties, Two long-term barley experiment, High protein peas, Watermelon super-pangenome, Resynthesizing mustard, Consumer preference and breeding
- Benefit–Cost Analysis of Increased Funding for Agricultural Research and Development in the Global South. Fancy model says funding agricultural research is great value for money. Ok, let’s see if we can find some examples.
- Exploring CGIAR’s efforts towards achieving the Paris Agreement’s climate-change targets. Yeah, but in designing such research to mitigate climate change there should be more complete integration of food-systems perspectives.
- Crop species diversity: A key strategy for sustainable food system transformation and climate resilience. Now there’s a nice thing to integrate into your climate change adaptation and integration research.
- Cultivating success: Bridging the gaps in plant breeding training in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Gonna need more plant breeders also, though.
- Artificial intelligence in plant breeding. Yeah, and probably more artificial intelligence too.
- Wheat genetic resources have avoided disease pandemics, improved food security, and reduced environmental footprints: A review of historical impacts and future opportunities. Great advances have been made (even without AI) by wheat breeders, but there’s still a lot of untapped diversity out there.
- Harnessing landrace diversity empowers wheat breeding. For example in the A. E. Watkins landrace collection.
- Enhanced radiation use efficiency and grain filling rate as the main drivers of grain yield genetic gains in the CIMMYT elite spring wheat yield trial. Gotta wonder if there’s a limit though.
- Origin and evolution of the bread wheat D genome. Maybe we can squeeze a bit more out of the D genome. I wonder what AI says about that.
- The Role of Crop Wild Relatives and Landraces of Forage Legumes in Pre-Breeding as a Response to Climate Change. As above, but for a bunch of forages.
- Stakeholder Insights: A Socio-Agronomic Study on Varietal Innovation Adoption, Preferences, and Sustainability in the Arracacha Crop (Arracacia xanthorrhiza B.). Here’s an interesting methodology to evaluate the impact of new varieties designed and developed by AI (or not).
- Deep genotyping reveals specific adaptation footprints of conventional and organic farming in barley populations — an evolutionary plant breeding approach. An initial, diverse barley population is allowed to adapt to contrasting organic and conventional conditions for 2 decades and diverges considerably genetically as a result. Don’t need AI to predict that. Perhaps more surprisingly, analysis suggests organic-adapted populations need to be selected for root traits to catch up in yield.
- Natural selection drives emergent genetic homogeneity in a century-scale experiment with barley. What is it with barley breeding and long-term experiments? This one shows that a hundred years of natural selection has massively narrowed genetic diversity. Why aren’t there long-term wheat experiments? Or are there?
- Association study of crude seed protein and fat concentration in a USDA pea diversity panel. Really high protein peas are possible. No word on whether kids will like them any better. Let’s check again in a hundred years?
- Telomere-to-telomere Citrullus super-pangenome provides direction for watermelon breeding. Forget sweetness and disease resistance, maybe one of these wild species will help us grasp the holy grail of seedlessness. Wait, let me check on the whole cost-benefit thing for this.
- An indigenous germplasm of Brassica rapa var. yellow NRCPB rapa 8 enhanced resynthesis of Brassica juncea without in vitro intervention. Sort of like that wheat D genome thing, but for mustard. I do wonder why we don’t try crop re-synthesis a lot more.
- Special issue: Tropical roots, tubers and bananas: New breeding tools and methods to meet consumer preferences. Why involving farmers in all of the above could be a good idea.
Nibbles: Cropscapes, Ecuador cacao, Nigerian yams, Lima bean show, Mesopotamian cooking, Nepal seed banks, RNA integrity, China genebanks, Cryo comics, Greening
- The authors of book “Moving Crops and the Scales of History” have been awarded the Edelstein Prize 2024 for their work to “redefine historical inquiry based on the ‘cropscape’: the assemblage of people, places, creatures, technologies, and other elements that form around a crop.” Let’s see how many cropscapes we can come up with today.
- Here’s one. The Ecuador cacao genebank gets some much-needed help.
- Digging into Nigerian yams. And another.
- Castle Hex has a programme on Lima beans on 7-8 September. Sounds like fun.
- What if you can’t work out what the crops are, though? As in Mesopotamian recipe books, for example.
- The community seed banks of Nepal have a new website. Good news for those Nepalese cropscapes.
- A new project is testing RNA integrity number (RIN) as a metric of seed aging for a bunch of rare wild plants. One day maybe community seed banks will be using it.
- China has inventoried its agricultural germplasm. Will it be applying RIN next?
- The French are using bandes dessinées to teach about cryopreservation of animal genetic resources. Livestockscapes?
- Some drylands are getting greener and some people think that’s a problem. Always something.
The diplomacy of germplasm collecting
I do love a good historical counterfactual. Unfortunately, Henry A. Wallace becoming president of the USA in 1945 is not a particularly good counterfactual. You really want these things to hang on a coin toss, and it was in fact extremely unlikely that FDR would have chosen Wallace again as his vice-president running mate in 1944.
However, that didn’t stop me enjoying the recent episode of the podcast Past Present Future entitled “What If… Wallace not Truman Had Become US President in 1945?” Because of the erudition of the host David Runciman and guest Ben Steil, of course. Because Wallace was a pretty unique combination of politician, scientist and, well, mystic. But also because of a throw-away statement by Steil about half-way through to the effect that Wallace had sponsored a germplasm collecting trip to Mongolia while Secretary of Agriculture in the 1930s.
That sent me down a Nicholas Roerich-shaped rabbit hole. Roerich was also a very unusual character, “a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, philosopher, and public figure. In his youth he was influenced by Russian Symbolism, a movement in Russian society centered on the spiritual. He was interested in hypnosis and other spiritual practices and his paintings are said to have hypnotic expression.” Roerich undertook a number of expeditions in Asia, for example this one in 1925–1929:
The Bolsheviks assisted Roerich with logistics while he was traveling through Siberia and Mongolia. However, they did not commit themselves to his reckless project of the Sacred Union of the East, a spiritual utopia that boiled down to Roerich’s ambitious attempts to stir the Buddhist masses of inner Asia to create a highly spiritual co-operative commonwealth under the patronage of Bolshevik Russia.
That sounds plenty interesting enough, but the expedition that is most relevant here took place a few years later:
In 1934–1935, the US Department of Agriculture, then headed by the Roerich admirer Henry A. Wallace, sponsored an expedition by Roerich and its scientists H. G. MacMillan and James F. Stephens to Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, and China. The expedition’s purpose was to collect seeds of plants which prevented soil erosion.
The expedition consisted of two parts. In 1934, they explored the Greater Khingan mountains and Bargan plateau in western Manchuria. In 1935, they explored parts of Inner Mongolia: the Gobi Desert, Ordos Desert, and Helan Mountains. The expedition found almost 300 species of xerophytes, collected herbs, conducted archeological studies, and found antique manuscripts of great scientific importance.
A review of Steil’s recent book The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century summarizes that adventure thus:
Wallace backed the Russian artist and intellectual Nicholas Roerich’s expedition to Mongolia with government money. Scientists from the Agriculture department accompanied the trek to collect drought-resistant plants for study. Yet Roerich had his own nation-building ambitions. Soon, Cordell Hull, FDR’s secretary of state, complained about private adventurers and people from the Department of Agriculture intruding into a delicate region over which Stalin loomed.
Before long, the expedition’s quasi-political activities were getting bad press, too. Wallace felt betrayed by Roerich, and he smashed him. Steil does not report that Wallace asked the nation’s preeminent banker, Winthrop Aldrich at Chase National, to cut off every public and private means of funding to the Russian and his team, thereby stranding the travelers in the middle of nowhere.
Wrapping up this episode, Steil shows Wallace dodging criticism by writing a letter for the record: the Roerich expedition’s purpose was to find plants, nothing more, and surely not to create a cockamamie central Asian polity. This letter underscores Wallace’s “dishonesty and moral cowardice,” says Steil.
Be that as it may, the germplasm is still there in the USDA genebanks. And Wallace did a little seed diplomacy of his own later on. The days of US secretaries of agriculture personally exchanging seeds, or indeed facilitating foreign germplasm collecting trips with the potential side-effect of establishing cockamamie polities, are long gone. But collaboration on crop diversity conservation does have a lot of potential to bring countries closer together: all countries are interdependent for crop diversity, after all. Maybe it would be good if ministers of agriculture around the world followed Wallace and took a little more of a direct interest in seeds and genebanks.