Genebanks

March 31, 2014March 29, 2014

Brainfood: Sunflower genomics, Omani chickens, Ozark cowpea, Amerindian urban gardens, Thai homegardens, Global North homegardens, African pollination, Ugandan coffee pollination, Use of wild species, Wheat and climate change, Iranian wheat evaluation, Tunisian artichokes, Fig core, Onion diversity, Distillery yeasts

Genomic variation in Helianthus: learning from the past and looking to the future. Paleopolyploid events, transposable elements, chromosomal rearrangements. Is there anything these plants don’t have? But then these guys would say that, wouldn’t they.
Assessment of genetic diversity and conservation priority of Omani local chickens using microsatellite markers. Unsurprisingly, the Dhofar (far S) and Musadam (far N) populations are the most different. I collected crops in both places way back when, and I bet you it would be the same for things like alfalfa and sorghum. Or cowpea, which brings me to…
Just Eat Peas and Dance: Field Peas (Vigna unguiculata) and Food Security in the Ozark Highlands, U.S. Still important after all these years. (I suspect Gary Nabhan would have predicted this, but I can’t even get an abstract of his paper Food Security, Biodiversity and Human Health: Ethnobiology as a Predictive Science.)
Amerindian Agriculture in an Urbanising Amazonia (Rio Negro, Brazil). Traditional systems survive move to cities just fine.
Human-Induced Movement of Wild Food Plant Biodiversity Across Farming Systems is Essential to Ensure Their Availability. Just like in Brazil, people move wild species to their homegardens in Thailand too.
Urban home food gardens in the Global North: research traditions and future directions. Uhm, could maybe Brazilian and Thai homegarden studies guide similar work in the North… Yep, and here’s how.
Priorities for Research and Development in the Management of Pollination Services for Agricultural Development in Africa. Old and traditional may not mean weak and out of date, but change gonna come anyway.
Social and Ecological Drivers of the Economic Value of Pollination Services Delivered to Coffee in Central Uganda. No wait, change here already.
Use it or lose it: measuring trends in wild species subject to substantial use. Wild species which are being used by people tend to be doing better than those that are not. Yeah, but settle down, the data are not that great.
An assessment of wheat yield sensitivity and breeding gains in hot environments. The successes have been coming from the lower potential material, not the elite of the elite.
Adaptation Patterns and Yield Stability of Durum Wheat Landraces to Highland Cold Rainfed Areas of Iran. It’s not always about heat. Anyway, in either case, thank goodness for diverse worldwide germaplasm collections.
Karyological and genome size insights into cardoon (Cynara cardunculus L., Asteraceae) in Tunisia. The wild populations from Sicily and Tunisia are closest to the crop.
Ex situ conservation of underutilised fruit tree species: establishment of a core collection for Ficus carica L. using microsatellite markers (SSRs). Fancy maths allows Spanish researchers to recover all microsats within a collection of 300 figs in only about 10% of the accessions. So who gives a fig for the rest, right?
Assessing the genetic diversity of Spanish Allium cepa landraces for onion breeding using microsatellite markers. Alas, all the Spanish Allium cepa landraces fall in the same cluster, so a core could be tricky. These guys really know their onions.
Biodiversity of non-Saccharomyces yeasts in distilleries of the La Mancha region (Spain). Gonna need some booze to wash down the figs and onions, right?

March 31, 2014

Nibbles: GMO debate, IPCC report, SPC ag strategy, Teff, Biofortification conference, Urban protected areas, Costa Rican ecosystems

Our Nature Comment genebank paper used to both denigrate and promote GMOs. Must be doing something right.
Same thing likely to happen with Fifth Assessment Report?
SPC’s Land Resources Division new strategic plan. Good to see an important role for the Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees.
The future of teff. Two sides to every story. But does it feature in your breakfast?
Biofortification conference off the ground.
Urban protected areas: I wonder how many crop wild relatives are involved.
Costa Rican ecosystems in trouble: I wonder how many crop wild relatives are involved.

March 29, 2014March 29, 2014

Nibbles: Date palm protection, IPCC report, Israel flora, Horsham genebank, Jubrassic Park, Broomcorn millet origins, Synthetic yeast chromosome

UAE date palms to get FAO recognition. So they’ll be ok then. Phew!
Unlike African agriculture, according to the IPCC.
Or Israel’s wild plants. Though what they intend to do about that is hidden behind a paywall. Can anyone tell me the answer?
The Australians know what to do. Build a new genebank…
…and grown ginarmous brassicas.
Pat Heslop-Harrison for his part thinks we should collect more wild Panicum. And who are we to argue with him?
Hey, worst comes to worst, we can always build our own beer yeast.

March 28, 2014May 3, 2018

Nibbles: Fiji lab, World Economic Plants, USDA garlic, Breeding conference, Borlaug Summit, Alex Morrell, Hayden Flour

Fiji commissions tissue culture lab to get clean planting materials out to farmers.
World Economic Plants: A Standard Reference finally out. But farmers probably knew all about them already.
Speaking of USDA, here’s what they do to conserve garlic.
Big conference in the UK on Breeding Plants for the Future. Seems like there’s one of these every week these days.
Like at CIMMYT, for example, in remembrance of Dr Norman Borlaug.
“Our germplasm – our genetic base here – is the best in the world. We dominate genetics in the industry.” I’d like to meet a seed industry guy who didn’t say that.
Meanwhile, in Arizona: “We’re not trying to go back in time, but capturing an authentic time.” I’d like to meet this guy. And put him together with the guy above.

March 26, 2014March 26, 2014

More on TePuke rice in New Zealand

Attentive readers may remember a post from some years back about the return of TePuke rice from IRRI’s genebank to New Zealand. Via our friends at IRRI, here’s photographic proof from Tony Olsen, a local farmer, that he actually planted that variety at what would be a world record southern latitude for the crop (even further S than Rocha, in Uruguay)…

…and that it actually grew, despite a not very sunny summer.

We wait to see whether there’s a decent harvest.

Incidentally, although IRRI was able to send Tony some seeds of TePuke, he says that:

A friend of mine helped me track down some TePuke Gold Rice seeds from the widow of the gentleman who supplied them to the NZ authorities that forwarded them to your institute in the 1970’s.

Which just goes to confirm that people really like holding on to their seeds.

Anyway, what with dire predictions about what will happen to rice yields in its Asian heartland, it might well be that places like New Zealand and Uruguay, now on the edge of the crop’s range, are going to feature much more prominently in the future. Maybe even parts of Japan, which has a young breed of farmers coming through who I’m sure are just itching to take on such upstarts.