- Greek organic farm resists.
- Communities getting into seed banking all over.
- Saving zapalote chico.
- Would you like chiltepines with that?
- No zapalote chico in South Africa, but lots of other maize.
- Conserving agricultural biodiversity in China.
- Including in Hainan.
- At the same time, China restricts foreign access to human genome data.
- Sexually plastic Australian wild tomato named at long last.
- Breeding flavour crops.
- And figuring out how much it will cost.
- Interesting project on human-chicken interactions.
- Veggie breeder wins World Food Prize.
- New coffee table book on cattle in Africa.
- Flagship agroforestry database gets new version. Anyone wanna test it for us?
- Minor cereals in Europe are anything but minor.
- And lots are conserved in Europe’s increasingly scrutinized genebanks.
- Meanwhile, a major cereals keeps getting the attention it also needs.
- “The candidate markers could be used by any rice genebank to potentially identify varieties with seeds that are particularly short- or long-lived in storage. Viability monitoring intervals could then be customized by variety.” And wheat?
Brainfood: Macadamia domestication, Middle Eastern wheat, ART virus, Open science, Red Queen, Food system change, Chinese Neolithic booze, Dough rings, Making maps, Biofortification, Endophytes, African maize, Switchgrass diversity, Ancestral legume
- Wild Origins of Macadamia Domestication Identified Through Intraspecific Chloroplast Genome Sequencing. One tree is the basis of the industry.
- The Israeli Palestinian wheat landraces collection: restoration and characterization of lost genetic diversity. Bringing it all back home.
- Using high‐throughput sequencing in support of a plant health outbreak reveals novel viruses in Ullucus tuberosus (Basellaceae). There’s always something…
- Plant health emergencies demand open science: Tackling a cereal killer on the run. …but openness will get us through it.
- Rapid evolution in plant–microbe interactions – a molecular genomics perspective. Until the next one.
- Understanding food systems drivers: A critical review of the literature. Spoiler alert: urbanization, raise in consumer income, population growth, attention paid to diet & health issues, technological innovations, intensification and homogenization of the agricultural sector, increase in frequency and intensity of extreme events, general degradation in soils and agro-ecological conditions, improved access to infrastructure and information, trade policies and other processes influencing trade expansion, internationalization of private investments, concerns for food safety. I guess diversity is in there somewhere.
- The origins of specialized pottery and diverse alcohol fermentation techniques in Early Neolithic China. So good, they invented fermentation twice.
- The Hoard of the Rings. “Odd” annular bread-like objects as a case study for cereal-product diversity at the Late Bronze Age hillfort site of Stillfried (Lower Austria). Unbaked, tarallini-like dried wheat/barley dough rings may have been used ritualistically. No, not like that.
- EviAtlas: a tool for visualising evidence synthesis databases. Everybody likes a map.
- Editorial: Improving the Nutritional Content and Quality of Crops: Promises, Achievements, and Future Challenges. A review of reviews of biofortification, and more.
- Fungal endophyte diversity from tropical forage grass Brachiaria. 38 fungi isolated from 9 Brachiaria species, but unclear if any are beneficial.
- Characteristics of maize cultivars in Africa: How modern are they and how many do smallholder farmers grow? Out of 500 samples in 13 countries, about half were in some way improved, covering about half of the surveyed planted area.
- QTL × environment interactions underlie adaptive divergence in switchgrass across a large latitudinal gradient. You can combine alleles which are locally advantageous in different places to get a
super-biofuel. - Reconstruction of ancestral genome reveals chromosome evolution history for selected legume species. The wild ancestor of peanut, pigeonpea, soybean, beans, mungbean, chickpea, lotus and medics was closest to wild peanuts. Maybe they can synthesize it?
Brainfood: Seed viability double, Forest reserves, Biodiversity value, Hunter-gatherers, Seed concentration, Past CC, Hot lablab, Mungbean adoption, Climate smart impacts, Tree threats, Chicken domestication, Top sorghum, Ancient wines, Plant extinctions
- Variation in seed longevity among diverse Indica rice varieties. 8 major loci associated with seed longevity.
- Seeds and the Art of Genome Maintenance. Viability is about the DNA repair response. Snap.
- Are Mayan community forest reserves effective in fulfilling people’s needs and preserving tree species? Sure they are.
- The power of argument. People don’t respond to utilitarian arguments when it comes to biodiversity. In the Netherlands.
- Do modern hunter-gatherers live in marginal habitats? Nope. What can I tell ya?
- New evidence on concentration in seed markets. Not as bad as some people think.
- Climate change has likely already affected global food production. From 2003 to 2008, there’s been a ~1% average reduction in consumable food calories in barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat.
- Selection of Heat Tolerant Lablab. 6 out of 44 accessions from the WorldVeg genebank are heat tolerant. Seems a lot.
- Counting the beans: quantifying the adoption of improved mungbean varieties in South Asia and Myanmar. 1.2 million farmers reached by WorldVeg varieties. Lablab next?
- Climate smart agricultural practices and gender differentiated nutrition outcome: An empirical evidence from Ethiopia. They work, but they’re better in combination.
- Pests and diseases of trees in Africa: A growing continental emergency. Into Africa…
- Genetics of adaptation in modern chicken. Not much of a domestication bottleneck; that came later.
- Multi-Trait Diverse Germplasm Sources from Mini Core Collection for Sorghum Improvement. From 40,000 in the genebank, to 242 in the mini-core, to 6 really cool ones (from Yemen, USA, China, Mozambique, and India x2 if you must know).
- Palaeogenomic insights into the origins of French grapevine diversity. Ancient DNA from 28 pips dating back to the Iron Age provides pretty good matches to grapes grown today.
- Global dataset shows geography and life form predict modern plant extinction and rediscovery. Almost 600 plants went extinct in modern times, at least, and I count about 20 crop wild relatives among them.
The art of seed storage research
Dr Christina Walters, Supervisory Plant Physiologist at the National Laboratory for Genetic Resource Preservation (NLGRP), Fort Collins, Colorado, kindly agreed to share her reaction to the recent paper Seeds and the Art of Genome Maintenance. If you leave a question or comment here, I’ll make sure to pass it on, and I’m sure Christina will respond.
I thought I would take a few moments to interpret this paper in the context of what we in Fort Collins do for the National Plant Genetic System effort (at least in terms of orthodox seeds, as is the topic of the Waterworth et al. review). Many of you are collaborating with us on studies of seed germination or longevity, and it would be interesting to know work happening independent of Fort Collins and how you interpret this paper relative to your own work.
Frontiers caters to a general plant biology audience, and so the Waterworth et al. review might not emphasize the critical distinction between seed germination and longevity that is needed for seed bank practitioners. Germination reflects a transition from dry seed to hydrated seedling. This is what our seed analysts measure upon receipt of seeds and during seed storage. Longevity, on the other hand, is a time or a rate parameter; how long can a seed be stored and still maintain its ability to germinate? Crudely speaking, seed germination tells us if the accession is dead yet. But, the more useful information — for NLGRP and maybe for you — is when the accession will die so we can warn you that the accession needs to be regenerated soon. Like climate change, seed longevity is either a prediction or something that can be described after-the-fact. Curve-fitting routines that describe decay after it has occurred might contribute to making predictive models if we can understand how variables contribute to the shape. What we really need are models that reliably predict longevity or describe how much error we can expect beyond the limits of inference of the model. To that end, many of us are seeking to answer (1) why do preserved seeds lose viability? and (2) what causes the high variation in seed longevity among species, individuals and even tissues within seeds? Some focus these questions further into what lesion(s) lead to mortality and whether these are general or specific. Waterworth and colleagues are known for their research on oxidative damage to the genome and subsequent repair, and so we’d expect them to show a little bias about the primary role of DNA damage and repair in lost viability. However, these authors do not make any direct cause-effect conclusions that specifically link accumulated DNA damage and failure to germinate, nor do they attempt to relate longevity differences (a comparison of time or rate) to this metabolic function.
The paper importantly acknowledges that repair only occurs in hydrated cells — after imbibition. This counters a 10-15 year body of work that assumed repair occurs in dry (i.e., preserved) cytoplasm, which had implications beyond the seed longevity context. The acknowledgement points to the discreet metabolism of dry biological systems. Once again, we see that a basic criterion for ‘aliveness’ (i.e., the ability to repair damaged molecules) is not demonstrated in dried seeds, even though they are alive — making seeds a fascinating experimental system to study grey area of alive but not apparently living. The study of recovery and repair after preservation is important to future work on embryo rescue, recalcitrant-seed “therapies” as well as improved viability assessments.
To accomplish NLGRP mission, we focus our work on the speed of damaging reactions within preserved cytoplasm, which is a bit removed from the Waterworth et al. review. We feel that understanding the speed at which damage accumulates can lead us to (a) better storage methods that limit damage (hence reduced need for metabolic repair) and (b) better models to predict when damage accumulates beyond repair (which we presume is a cause of mortality). We might find our work intersecting with Waterworth’s in terms of the contribution of DNA damage to cell mortality. One of the hardest aspects of our research is the inability to correlate damage or repair with mortality and viability. That is because we are studying change before seeds die (we call it the asymptomatic period of seed ageing) and we are studying it in a system that doesn’t show typical signs of life until you wet it up (I like to call it discreet discrete).
Ricing to the challenge of climate change
There’s a nice feature on the BBC on preparing rice cultivation for climate change. I’ve taken the liberty of dissecting out the bit about the IRRI genebank and the breeding work of Haiyan Xiong. Mainly because I found all the scrolling so annoying.
Farmers in China are acutely aware of the impact of water shortages. Population growth, increasing urbanisation and industrial water use are all making water shortages more common in China, says Haiyan Xiong, a postdoctoral researcher in plant sciences at the University of Cambridge. Water distribution is geographically uneven, with limited rainfall in northern China and seasonal droughts in southern China.
Much of China’s variable water supply is going to a single crop: rice. About 4,000 litres of water are needed to produce just one kilogram of rice, according to Xiong. Other estimates vary between about 2,500 and 5,000 litres. In China, irrigation for the crop accounts for about 70% of the total agricultural water use.
One response to this problem has been to look for types of rice that use less water. To this end, thousands of rice varieties are being preserved at the world’s largest rice gene bank, in the Philippines. These include enhanced varieties such as ‘scuba rice’, which can withstand flooding, and the drought-tolerant Sahod Ulan varieties being used by some Filipino farmers.
Xiong and her colleagues hope to combine genome editing with traditional breeding methods to create new drought-resistant varieties. But this is a challenge. “Due to the complexity of the genetic mechanism…not much progress has been made in improving rice drought resistance in China,” she says. “Very few genes can be used in actual production to improve the rice drought resistance.”
Yet the team have identified a single gene in upland rice, known as OsLG3, that’s linked to the length of rice grains as well as drought tolerance. Upland regions, which are dry and hilly, are a much harder environment to grow rice in than lowland paddy fields, and upland rice is usually of lower quality. So introducing the upland drought-tolerance gene into the more widely cultivated lowland rice could allow for the best of both worlds.
Another new type of rice bred for challenging conditions is known as Green Super Rice.
Chinese soil, especially in coastal provinces, naturally contains high amounts of salt, which can become even more concentrated in areas with low rainfall and high evaporation. When there’s too much salt in the soil, plants experience something known as osmotic stress. A large amount of water exits the plant’s cells, causing them to shrink suddenly. The process limits plant growth and productivity.
As with Xiong’s drought-tolerant upland-lowland rice, researchers have found genetic traits in rice varieties that can help Green Super Rice withstand high salt levels and osmotic stress. This often involves backcross breeding, in which genes associated with a desirable trait are bred into a second variety by hybridisation. So far, Green Super Rice appears to produce a high yield in addition to having a high salt tolerance. The hope is that this could open up coastal or other high-salt areas to rice growing.