- The future of rice science. It says here.
- Is Holistic Management the SRI of livestock?
- Another online botanical database to contend with. Eventually.
- NASA maps poleward vegetation shift. I suspect the Progressive Cattleman will be onto that in a flash. See what I did there?
- More fancy aerial science, this time at the service of phenotyping. And more of the same.
- Ghana’s agricultural research system deconstructed. Would have been nice to mention the genebank.
- African food, in Africa and America. And in audio.
- Propagating tropical trees for fun and profit.
- The epigenetics of maternal nutrition, courtesy of USDA.
- Liberians showered in seeds.
- Kim, are you listening? This one’s for you.
- IPK reaches out to India.
The unlikely origin of Venere
An Italian walks into a genebank… No, not the beginning of a tasteless joke. But still rather a funny story, so bear with me. The genebank is that of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and the Italian visitor naturally starts discussing Italian rice with the (non-Italian) genebank manager. In particular, he tells him about this strange black rice they have in Italy, great tasting and great for the health, an old traditional Italian variety, dating back to time immemorial. Venere, it is called. Does the IRRI genebank, the largest rice genebank in the world after all, perhaps have it?
So the IRRI genebank manager, who likes that sort of challenge, does a bit of googling, and a bit of trawling of the various databases at his command. And what should he discover, but that the old traditional Italian variety actually traces back to a donation made by IRRI 22 years back. Yes, records agree that in 1991 IRRI sent a sample of a black rice from Indonesia (IRGC 17863, local name “Ketan Gubat”), collected in 1972 in a place called Yogyakarta, to W.X. Ren at the Italian seed company Sardo Piemontese Sementi. Venere is a descendant of Ketan Gubat.
Helping develop a new market in speciality rice has not traditionally been counted among IRRI’s impacts. There’s a first time for everything, I suppose. But there’s a bigger point here. How do you monitor this kind of impact pathway in a systematic way? Continuously chase literature on the use of all the hundreds of accessions a genebank sends out? Unlikely. 1 No, what you really need is a curious visitor who knows a particular variety walking into your genebank.
Cheap at half the price
…a cost benefit comparison based on the results of this study confirms that the benefits of the GGB, even with the conservative estimation adopted within the current framework, significantly exceeds the costs of its operation. Thus in terms of insurance values generated by the GGB, the flow of annual equivalent values were estimated to represent a minimum of 2.95 million euros whereas operating costs of the GGB currently correspond to less than 3 per cent of this amount on an annual basis. Hence the present study suggests that maintaining and further developing the GGB is an economically justified strategy.
The final report on the “Valuation of the Greek Genebank” (that would be the GBB) project is out. Actually, it may have been out for a while, but I’ve only just now found it. We have blogged about it before. We’ll blog about it again, no doubt, when we’ve digested the results, of which the above quote is the parting shot.
Nibbles: Hunger meet, Collecting info, Mapping species, Fair trade, Irish Famine, Rice changes, Food podcast, Cow genomics
- Hidden hunger experts come out into the open.
- Bioversity germplasm collecting reports go online.
- Where the threatened species are.
- Fair trade, shmare trade.
- The Lumper makes a comeback.
- Rice innovation in Bangladesh, abandonment in Nepal.
- Cherfas smears himself in bog butter for new podcast.
- Genomics and the livestock industry.
Brainfood: Diverse grasslands, More diverse grasslands, Latitudinal meta-gradients, Acacia barcoding, Cryoconserving recalcitrant seeds, Tree tomato, Modeling parasites, Landscape complexity & services, Genomics & breeding
Transgressive overyielding of soil microbial biomass in a grassland plant diversity gradient. Dead link. More microbial biomass in mixtures of plants than in each of the monocultures. Which I guess is a good thing?- Ecosystem function enhanced by combining four functional types of plant species in intensively managed grassland mixtures: a 3-year continental-scale field experiment. That transgression goes for the yield of the plants too. The mixtures were also more resistant to weed invasion.
- Latitudinal gradients as natural laboratories to infer species’ responses to temperature. Meta-analysis shows that many life history traits vary with latitude, but not necessarily with temperature.
- DNA barcoding for conservation, seed banking and ecological restoration of Acacia in the Midwest of Western Australia. Not quite there yet, is it?
- Preservation of Recalcitrant Seeds. We have the technology. Recalcitrance is not an excuse. And may not be as common as advertised anyway.
- Genetic diversity and relationships in accessions from different cultivar groups and origins in the tree tomato (Solanum betaceum Cav.). It is variable. It originated in Ecuador. Even the press release struggles to say much more than that. They should have asked the mother-in-law.
- Metabolic approaches to understanding climate change impacts on seasonal host-macroparasite dynamics. Fortunately, and yet suspiciously, it is easy to estimate the model parameters even when you don’t have much data.
- Flow and stability of natural pest control services depend on complexity and crop rotation at the landscape scale. You need complexity in both space and time to get the most out of your landscapes.
- Improving fruit and wine: what does genomics have to offer? A lot. But you have to be ready for it.