- Culturally valuable minority crops provide a succession of floral resources for flower visitors in traditional orchard gardens. Proper gardens better for pollinators than unmanaged plots.
- Trends in access of plant biodiversity data revealed by Google Analytics. No impact of social media on the use of plant data, and the future is mobiles.
- Worldwide Genetic Diversity for Mineral Element Concentrations in Rice Grain. Most, though not all, elements showed high heritability, which is good news for breeders.
- Agriculture facilitated permanent human occupation of the Tibetan Plateau after 3600 BP. No barley, no Tibetans.
- Seed fates in crop-wild hybrid sunflowers: crop allele and maternal effects. Having wild mothers helps wild-crop hybrids survive in the wild.
- Coconut (Cocos nucifera l.) pollen cryopreservation. Eureka!
- The evolution of seed dormancy: environmental cues, evolutionary hubs, and diversification of the seed plants. More dormancy, more speciation.
- The evolutionary ecology of C4 plants. C4 opens new niches, but it’s all a matter of contingency and you have to follow the whole evolutionary history of a group to understand its current ecological strategy.
- A Minor Role for Environmental Adaptation in Local–Scale Maize Landrace Distribution: Results from a Common Garden Experiment in Oaxaca, Mexico. It’s the social factors, stupid.
- Crop immunity against viruses: outcomes and future challenges. PAMP (pathogen-associated molecular patterns)-triggered immunity (PTI) may be the future.
Irish eyes smiling about apple conservation
Our office complimentary copy of Michael Hennerty’s The Heritage Apples Of Ireland has arrived, and it’s a real beauty. We somehow missed the announcement of its publication back in the summer.
The book is written by Dr. Michael Hennerty, who for many years was Head of the Department of Horticulture in University College Dublin, and provides detailed genetic information of 68 different varieties of indigenous Irish apples using high resolution photographs. The descriptors used in the book utilise the current internationally recognised descriptor system and a key is also included to facilitate the identification of historical Irish cultivars by non-experts.
I particularly like the section on “finders and keepers”, people who have been involved in the conservation of Irish apples over the years. People like John George Dalkeith Lamb, who…
…collected old apples from 1945 to 1949 and established the UCD collection. Prof. E.J. Clarke maintained the collection until it was destroyed in 1970. Repatriated in 1996. Now planted at UCD, Belfield, Dublin.
That “repatriated” is intriguing, but I can find no further explanation of it online. Anyone out there know the details?
Brainfood: Daniel Zohary, Blue dates, Crop diversification, Tunisian oases, Cranberry diversity, Drought breeding, Seed-use watermelon, Cattle history, Apple conservation
- Daniel Zohary: Geneticist and Explorer of Plant Domestication. Nice profile of iconic explorer of agricultural biodiversity.
- The date palm with blue dates Phoenix senegalensis André (Arecaceae): A horticultural enigma is solved. A variety of P. canariensis, as it turns out.
- Crop diversification as a smallholder livelihood strategy within semi-arid agricultural systems near Mount Kenya. It will work better at higher elevations.
- Change of oases farming systems and their effects on vegetable species diversity: Case of oasian agro-systems of Nefzaoua (South of Tunisia). Not working at all in oases.
- Clonal diversity and genetic differentiation revealed by SSR markers in wild Vaccinium macrocarpon and Vaccinium oxycoccos. Cranberries have much more variation than previously thought.
- Two decades of InterDrought conferences: are we bridging the genotype-to-phenotype gap? Yes, slowly, but genomics will help. Eventually.
- Microsatellite Marker-based Genetic Diversity of Seed-use Watermelon (Citrullus lanatus ssp. vulgaris var. megalaspermus Lin et Chao) Collections. They’re all very similar.
- On the History of Cattle Genetic Resources. The loss of breeds adapted to local conditions and extensive management are the main threats to the genetic diversity amassed over the past 12,000 years.
- The vulnerability of US apple (Malus) genetic resources. Could be worse. Could be better.
Nibbles: Quasilocavore, Returning potatoes, Singapore veggies, Floating gardens, Timber trees, Allanblackia, Cranberry glut, Wild turkeys
- Sure, eat locally. But not too much.
- Andean farmers don’t have much of a choice about eating locally, but at least now they have more potato varieties to choose from.
- Growing your own is about as local as you can get in Singapore.
- Maybe they should do it the Bangladeshi way.
- A list of the world’s commercial timber trees (pdf). Can’t help thinking they should have made more of this.
- Which doesn’t include Allanblackia.
- Let them eat cranberries.
- Wild turkey with that?
The ins and outs of safety duplicating germplasm collections
On that issue of collaboration between national programmes and international genebanks, which we alluded to yesterday when we were talking about ICARDA and Morocco, it might be worth highlighting another example. We Nibbled this before, but it can stand a bit more exposure.
The new genebank of Embrapa, which opened in April this year at Cenargen, one of the 46 units of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation in Brasilia, received today (06/11) the first deposit from an international collection of plant genetic resources. This is a backup of [part of] the potato collection from CIP (International Potato Center) in Peru, which has four thousand samples of wild species and cultivated varieties, and is the most diverse and extensive in the world, as the country [together with neighbours] is the genetic cradle of this Andean crop. This first instalment consisted of 180 [in vitro] samples from nine varieties. The next shipment will be sent in February 2015 and by the middle of next year, probably the whole collection will have arrived in Brazil.
That’s a translation from an Embrapa press release, 1 by me via Google Translate. Vegetatively propagated (or clonal) crops such as potato and cassava, which are conserved in the field and in tissue culture, require a bit more effort for safety duplication compared to seed crops. See, for example, what’s going on with bananas. It’s great to see CIP and Embrapa coming together in this way. Maybe Embrapa could also eventually safety duplicate in reciprocal fashion its own collections in the international centres. Its cassava clonal collection is very important, for example, and not safety duplicated. Look at Table 3 on page 21 of the global cassava conservation strategy (pdf), and then read the discussion on page 41:
Column 14 [of Table 3] indicates the importance of introducing national program accessions that are not yet represented in the international centers, for safety duplication (see also later sections). These low, medium and high priorities are based on number of in situ or ex situ materials not yet at CIAT or IITA, and the relative importance of that country’s cassava genetic diversity. Critical countries for further representation in the international centers are: Brazil, Peru, Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, D.R. Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania, along with several other countries of medium urgency.
Some seeds from Embrapa are already in Svalbard. But there’s no Svalbard for clonal collections, alas.