- Avenues to meet food security. The role of agronomy on solving complexity in food production and resource use. Wait, what, it’s not all about the breeding?
- Population studies of native grass-endophyte symbioses provide clues for the roles of host jumps and hybridization in driving their evolution. Wait, what, we have to conserve these things too now?
- Morphological diversity in breadfruit (Artocarpus, Moraceae): insights into domestication, conservation, and cultivar identification. Cool, we now have a multi-access Lucid key to help us recognize varieties.
- Geographical variation of foxtail millet, Setaria italica (L.) P. Beauv. based on rDNA PCR–RFLP. Geographic differentiation, centre in East Asia, evidence of migration, yada yada.
- Within-genotype epigenetic variation enables broad niche width in a flower living yeast. Wait, what, now we have to document the epigenome too?
- Phylogeography of Asian wild rice, Oryza rufipogon: a genome-wide view. Fancy markers come through where lesser breeds caused confusion. Two groups, clinally arranged, with the China-Indochina group close to indica, neither close to japonica. So one, Chinese, domestication event, yada yada.
Sonalika searching
A blog post from CIMMYT presented a welcome opportunity to play around with a range of online information resources on wheat varieties, despite the fact that some of the links are broken.
So let’s say I want to find out about a particular variety. Sonalika, for example. I heard about it as being an important older Indian variety, and want to find out more: a pedigree, maybe some performance data, maybe even get some seed. First, I headed on over to the IWIS-Bib database, which “is a supplement to the International Wheat Information System. Each record in IWIS-Bib identifies a publication, and each publication describes a cultivar.” For Sonalika, that returns the citations of 11 references. Good start, though I do now have to get hold of the publications themselves. Maybe in the future I’ll be able to download a PDF, or there will be a link to Google Scholar, or whatever.
Let’s move on. I was not able to find a way of getting performance data for Sonalika from IWIS proper, though I was at the time pretty sure I’d be able to order seed of it from CIMMYT. But, having thought that, I then checked, and Sonalika does not feature in a Genesys search as being conserved at CIMMYT, although you get hits from various other genebanks, including USDA. And there’s plenty of characterization and evaluation data there. I may be doing CIMMYT a disservice here, though. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, but certainly there was no way of getting easily from a bibliographic hit on a particular variety to evaluation data on it. Which it would be nice to be able to do.
Moving on again, I then headed over to the Genetic Resources Information and Analytical System for Wheat and Triticale (GRIS), the main subject of the blog post I mentioned at the beginning. Entering Sonalika in the little search box gave me a whole lot of very cool stuff. Like a pedigree: II-53-388/ANDES//(SIB)PITIC-62/3/LERMA-ROJO-64. Which you might like to compare with the one on GRIN: II53-388/Andes//Pitic 62 sib/3/Lerma Rojo 64. Reassuringly similar. And accession numbers; which interestingly do not include CIMMYT. So it does look like I wouldn’t be able to get Sonalika from them after all. You also get summary evaluation data and even recommendations for use, which is very handy. And a pedigree diagram, which is, however, frustratingly impossible to export.
So, overall, a not uninteresting though ultimately somewhat disappointing experience, mainly because of the necessity of hopping between websites. But maybe those linkages will come now that a bunch of the people concerned have had a meeting, as described in the post that started all this. Fingers crossed.
Nibbles: Coconut origins, Microbe genebank, Stay-green barley, Sachs may suck, Cap in hand, Wheat information, IITA birthday, Cat art, Poppy biosynthesis, Correcting names
- Coconut origins, the quick version.
- Chile gets a bugbank.
- Stay-green barley genes located. In a genebank collection, natch. What now, a Stay-green Revolution?
- New Economist blog agnostic about Millennium Villages.
- Plant scientists call for $100 billion investment in, er, plant science.
- Wheat pedigrees online.
- IITA a youthful 45.
- Cats in Islam.
- Noscapine production in poppies is complex, but not so complex that boffins can’t figure it out.
- Want help in getting taxonomic names right? What you need is the Taxonomic Name Resolution Service. Does that mean we don’t need this any more?
Nibbles: GIBF, Identifiers, Farming animals, Geomedicine, Seed saving, Seeds of Success, CWRs, CORA 2012, Sourdough culture bank, Phenology, Wild Coffea, Cassava conference, Condiments, Gulf truffles, Cashew nut, Home gardens, Tea, Bacterial diversity
- GIBF taxonomy is broken. We’re doomed. No, but it can be fixed. Phew.
- Maybe start with a unique identifier for taxonomists? Followed by one for genebank accessions… Yeah. Right.
- Domesticating animals won’t save them. And more on the commodification of wildlife. Is that even a word?
- Geomedicine is here. Can geonutrition be far behind? We’re going to need better maps, though.
- Saving heirlooms, one bright student at a time.
- “Botanists Make Much Use of Time.” If you can get beyond the title, there’s another, quite different, but again quite nice, seed saving story on page 3.
- “Why aren’t these plants the poster children [for plant conservation]?” You tell me.
- Or, instead of doing something about it, as above, we could have a week of Collective Rice Action 2012.
- You can park your sourdough here, sir.
- How Thoreau is helping boffins monitor phenology. But there’s another way too.
- “She drinks coffee. She farms coffee. She studies coffee.” Wild coffee.
- Massive meet on the Rambo Root. Very soon, in Uganda.
- Ketchup is from China? Riiiight. Whatever, who cares, we have the genome!
- And in other news, there are truffles in Qatar. But maybe not for long.
- The weirdness of cashews.
- The normalcy of home gardens as a source of food security — in Indonesia.
- Ok, then, the weirdness of oolong tea.
- Aha, gotcha, the normalcy of office bacterial floras! Eh? No, wait…
Agrobiodiversity education in context
A piece on “Generating the next generation” by Nigel Chaffey in his latest, always indispensable, Plant Cuttings had me trawling around for an hour or so last night amid botanical teaching resources, looking for stuff that might be relevant to agricultural biodiversity. It’s not a great haul, alas.
Teaching Tools in Plant Biology, published by the American Society of Plant Biologists, does have Genetic Improvements in Agriculture, but it’s behind a subscription wall. The American Society of Plant Biologists has pages of resources for K-12 and higher education, but the focus seems to be on biotechnology. Fortunately, the Plant Science TREE (Tool for Research Engaged Education), from the Gatsby Plant Science Summer Schools, does have a useful, freely available section on Plants and People.
I was also momentarily encouraged by seeing an old friend posing in his rice genebank on the homepage of Science & Plants for Schools website:
But the caption he is lumbered with is, weirdly, about the role of plant sciences in “developing cures for diseases.” And anyway nothing happens when you click on him. However, feeding the world is also mentioned (phew), and I was in the end able to find something on genebanks and plant breeding. I wouldn’t call the coverage comprehensive, though. Nor systematically presented.
There is, of course, a place for teaching resources specifically for agrobiodiversity, but one would like to see the subject a little better integrated into the wider plant sciences education universe. Wouldn’t one? Well, not if there are many students like Katie DeGroot.