Category: Genebanks

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The rice in Spain grows mainly for the snails

I suspect Prof. Foster was being facetious, and in any case would have to fight it out with other researchers working in a different direction, but maybe temperatures in England will soon be as suitable for rice cultivation as the rainfall regime. In Europe (and indeed Japan and New Zealand) the northern limit of rice cultivation seems to be at about 40-45 deg N, which covers the famous growing regions of the Po Valley in Italy and the Camargue in France. However, the very northernmost limit of rice cultivation in the world is at about 53 degrees N, which would put it at the latitude of Liverpool, say. So the south of England may not be entirely out of bounds in the future, if you factor in climate change and clever plant breeding.

Of course, as we read yesterday, temperature is not the only constraint to rice production in Europe. Spanish rice farmers are fighting an exotic snail, which may spread from the Ebro delta, which incidentally is on the 40th parallel N or thereabouts. Although rice has been in Spain since maybe the 8th century, its cultivation in the Ebro is relatively recent.

The first Designation of Origin for rice in Europe was granted to Calasparra rice which is grown in a mountainous area along the river Segura in the region of Murcia, the varieties being Bomba and Balilla X Solana. Both are sold as either brown or white rice. Bomba rice is the best-known of the Spanish varieties. Its grains are rounded but they increase lengthwise by almost fifty per cent during the cooking process and are very absorbent.

Also protected by a Designation of Origin is the rice grown traditionally in the Júcar river basin and in the Albufera, the most famous of the natural wetlands in Valencia where the varieties are Senia, Bahía and Bomba. The rice, mostly Bahía, grown in the Ebro delta in Tarragona (Catalonia) is also covered by a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI).

For the benefit of prospective English rice farmers, Bomba is available from the Spanish genebank, and elsewhere too. No word on whether there is material somewhere resistant to the ravages of Pomacea insularum.

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Nibbles: CGIAR priorities, Drought tolerant rice, Agroecology bibliography, Amaranthus seed production video, Ethiopian genebank, Yemeni genebank

  • UN Special Rapporteur on food thinks “questions of the 60s are not the questions of today.” Does he think the CGIAR is answering the questions of the 60s? One suspects so, but surely there are points of agreement, e.g. nutrition, food systems, natural resources management…
  • Farmers would be willing to pay quite a premium for drought tolerant (DT) rice hybrids, but for DT varieties not so much. That’s an opportunity for public-private partnerships. Or is that a 60s answer to a 60s question?
  • Mr de Schutter probably knows all about this bibliography of agroecology in action. Which all seems so much more 60s than hybrid rice somehow.
  • How 60s is it to want to produce decent amaranthus seed? It’s totally unfair, but I can’t resist linking to this now.
  • Ethiopian genebank, set up in response to the genetic erosion of the 60s, gets nice, long writeup in The Guardian by way of introduction to a bare-bones couple of final paragraphs on some G8 poverty reduction plan. Nice video though.
  • There was no Facebook in the 60s for genebanks to strut their stuff on.
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CGN18108 it is

Simon Foster very kindly took the trouble to post a comment setting the record straight on the source of that blight gene:

Apologies, a previous tweet from ourselves erroneously confirmed the accession as CGN18000. It is in fact CGN18108 which is still listed in the database as Solanum okadae (was subsequently found to be S. venturii in DNA fingerprinting studies).

The origin of Rpi-vnt1 is detailed in the original research paper describing the cloning and characterisation of the gene and which is cited in the Roy. Soc. paper published yesterday. All acknowledgement of sources was published in that paper.

Foster SJ, Park T-H, Pel M, Brigneti G, Sliwka J, Jagger L, van der Vossen E, Jones JDG. 2009 Rpi- vnt1.1, a Tm-2(2) homolog from Solanum venturii, confers resistance to potato late blight. MPMI 22, 589 – 600. (doi:10.1094/MPMI-22-5-0589)

Here’s the relevant bit of that paper:

Accessions of S. venturii and S. okadae were obtained from the Centre for Genetics Resources in Wageningen, the Netherlands (CGN) (Table 1). The S. venturii accessions were originally listed as S. okadae in the CGN database but have recently been reclassified based on work using amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers to study the validity of species labels in Solanum section Petota (Jacobs 2008; Jacobs et al. 2008).

So my apologies to Dr Foster. There is indeed a very full and proper acknowledgement of the source of the gene in the earlier paper. However, I do still think that it would not really have taken much effort to also include an acknowledgement in the later paper. The confusion over which accession was actually used that I fell into, admittedly without taking the trouble of following the references, is evidence of why it’s important to do so.

Now to suggest to CGN that they may want to change the species name of CGN18108 in their database…

LATER: Just realized we started talking about all this quite a while ago.

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Credit where credit is due

ResearchBlogging.orgYou may have been following the reaction to the media frenzy about the announcement yesterday of a new way of making potatoes resistant to blight, cause of the Irish Famine a century and a half ago. I won’t add to the confusion, beyond saying that, as in everything in life, there are always alternatives, and wouldn’t it be nice if we gave them all a fair go?

No, what I want to talk about here is where the gene in question came from, the gene for blight resistance that was inserted into the popular British variety Desiree to such apparently good effect. We know from the paper that the gene is called Rpi-vnt1.1 and that it came from the potato wild relative Solanum venturii, but that’s all. I think that’s insufficient. There may be a reference in the paper or the supplementary material 1 to the source of the Solanum venturii germplasm that was used in this work, but I was unable to find it. Apologies to the authors if I missed it, and thanks to whoever it was at the Sainsbury Lab that tweeted a response to my request for information:

It turns out that the germplasm was obtained from the Centre for Genetic Resources, the Netherlands, which has often been mentioned on this blog. Most recently, as coincidence would have it, yesterday, and on the subject of potatoes to boot. CGN is at the very forefront of genebank documentation, so it was very easy to find that there are 3 accessions of the species in question at CGN, that only one of those is resistant to blight, that it is CGN18000, that it was collected in 1972 in Argentina at an elevation of 3200m and that it came to CGN via the Institut fur Pflanzenbau und Pflanzenzuchtung Bundesforschungsanstalt, Braunschweig, Germany. There are more accessions out there (although apparently not at CIP, the International Potato Center, at least according to Genesys), and also herbarium specimens. Enough in fact to come up with an estimate of the overall geographic distribution of S. venturii, and perhaps identify some gaps.

Screen Shot 2014-02-18 at 8.55.55 AM

Or am I wrong? It’s an informed guess. If there had been more than one accession with resistance, it would have been difficult to know which one was actually used in the paper. Anyway, I look forward to the day when even the authors of whizz-bang biotech papers will spend five minutes to do what I just did and properly acknowledge, perhaps even link to, the genebank, and the specific accession, whose existence ultimately allowed them to do their work.

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