Category: Genebanks

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Fighting the Ebola of maize

Speaking of Denise Costich, she recently visited CIMMYT’s Global Maize Program in Africa and shared this photo — frightening, and yet also hopeful, as she explains below:

maize

Maize Lethal Necrosis (MLN) is being called the “Ebola of maize” — it is actually a “perfect storm” of two viruses hitting the plants at the same time, carried all over the place by insect vectors… It’s hitting East Africa really hard right now, and CIMMYT scientists are screening as much germplasm as they can, in the search for resistance genes. Here you see an example of a “moderately tolerant” line. To the left of that plot, you can see another line that was completely decimated…

I’m featuring Denise a lot lately to make up for the fact that I forgot to take a photo of her to include in the mosaic of CGIAR genebank managers :)

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Embrapa’s “ark” on Globo

“If you have a disease, a pest or adverse climatic conditions, we can look for features that serve to combat that disease or that climatic situation, and then create new varieties that can cope with this challenge,” explains Mauro Carneiro, Head of Biotechnology/Embrapa.

One precaution that has already paid off: in 1994, the Kraho indians were able to recover with the help of Embrapa a kind of corn which for three decades had not been grown in the villages in the North and Northeast regions.

That’s the Google Translate version of part of an article on Embrapa’s new genebank in Brasilia, which includes a video. Attentive readers will remember we blogged about that Kraho story some years back. A second example of restoration of genetic resources from a genebank trumpeted on the internet — and TV in this case! — within a few days. One more and we have a trend.