- Another use for chillies: keeping errant apes away.
- Catfish are the new tilapia.
- New fungicide-resistant strain of potato late blight found in UK. (How do they name these things?)
- The chickenization of the US beef industry, on NPR. Salutary.
- The Seed Warrior of Svalbard gets over-exposed.
- What HarvestPlus is doing on each of its crops, in a handy brochure. And more on the same subject but a different crop from Bill Gates himself.
- But that’s just one aspect of the relationship between agriculture and nutrition/health. Right? Right.
- You also need dietary diversification, right? Right.
- What’s that you say? Biodiversity databasing need not be hellish?
- Danny waxes nostalgic about Wallis and Futuna grapes. He and I also met a few nuts in the Pacific in our time. Grape-nuts. Geddit?
- Latest Plant Cuttings includes big piece on cassava.
- And you can put that in an ecological context.
- Do you have a forgotten germplasm collection?
- Vietnam gets its first EU Geographic Indication. Can’t help thinking it need not have bothered.
- Greek yoghurt, on the other hand…
More from that Los Baños fire
Philippine National Genebank, a set by Global Crop Diversity Trust on Flickr.
Last Friday, under the upgrading project we mentioned that same day, the Filipino national genebank’s three transformers were adapted to handle the increased power demand. Early Saturday morning the power unfortunately failed. When it came back on, the fire started, perhaps due to a wiring fault. The 2nd floor was destroyed. That housed the in vitro lab, with duplicates of collections of banana, taro, sweet potato and yams which are also maintained in the field. The 1st floor is ok, except for some flooding damage from the fire engines, which affected chemicals and some equipment in the molecular lab. Some data has also been lost. Thankfully, there were no casualties. Our best wishes to the staff for a rapid recovery from this calamity.
CORRECTION: The 2nd floor of the building housed the molecular and cytological characterization labs, as well as the in vitro conservation unit and the documentation unit, library and reseach staff offices. The 1st floor has the in vitro research lab, seed research lab, morphological characterization lab and more research staff offices.
Fire at the Filipino genebank
We have received sad news of a fire at the national genebank in the Philippines, the same one which featured in the news item we nibbled yesterday about the much-needed refurbishments it is undergoing. More details as we get them. If you have any information, let us know.
Nibbles: Blogs, Geographical Indicators, India, Benefits, Forest regeneration, Flypaper
- My favorite agriculture blogs. Can you say “parochial”?
- Want to track Geographical Indicators? Look no further.
- India’s agriculture magazine tackles Agro-Biodiversity For Food Security.
- And GFAR promotes a new initiative to realise the benefits of agrobiodiversity. Love is all around.
- National Plant Genetics Resources Laboratory (NPGRL) at the University of the Philippines at Los Baños checks in to rehab.
- Bioversity scientist plays with fire, for better and more diverse forest regeneration.
- Mutation breeding; Matt explains the lack of breakthroughs in a bit more detail.
- Fabulous, complex story of spiders, flies and microbes. Add ’em together for green flypaper.
Genebanks forgotten, again
Bill Gates highlights his family Foundation’s work on cassava viruses in his latest letter. We have on occasion wondered here why the CGIAR didn’t make more of its work on that subject.
But anyway. I really wanted to rue a different lost opportunity here.
Historically, increasing the productivity of a crop meant finding two seed variants, each with some desirable and undesirable characteristics, and crossing them until you get a combination with mostly the good characteristics of the two parents. This required actually growing tens of thousands of plants to see how they develop in different growing conditions over time—for example, when water is plentiful and when it is not. Now the process is quite different. Imagine the analogy of a large public library with rooms full of books. We used to have to use the card catalogue and browse through the books to find the information we needed. Now we know the precise page that contains the piece of information we need. In the same way, we can find out precisely which plant contains what gene conferring a specific characteristic. This will make plant breeding happen at a much faster clip.
Would it have killed him to slip in some recognition of the genebanks where all those “books” are so painstakingly and expensively kept?