Genebanks

June 26, 2011June 24, 2011

How to conserve animal genetic resources

And speaking of eloquent images, here’s another one, this time from the world of animal genetic resources conservation.

Ooops, no, that’s not the one I meant. It was this one:

Which comes from the draft FAO Guidelines for the In Vivo Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources. Lots more details there. Via CGN.

June 24, 2011November 29, 2017

Nibbles: Adaptation, Soil bacteria, AnGR, Edible flowers, Potato chips, Ancient beer

July issue of CSA News, official magazine for members of the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America and Soil Science Society of America, has article on “Crop Adaptation to Climate Change” based on official CSSA position statement, “Crop Adaptation to Climate Change.”
Factsheet on bacterial diversity and why it’s good for soils.
FAO guidelines for the In Vivo Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources discussed in Europe.
Please eat the daisies. Or other flowers.
Farming chips.
Never thought I’d get bored of reading about ancient beer.

June 23, 2011June 23, 2011

Wakehurst Place

Wakehurst Place, a photo by luigig on Flickr.

This is where Kew’s seed research programme, including the genebank, was housed before they built the Millennium Seed Bank. Pretty cool, eh?

June 23, 2011June 23, 2011

Nibbles: Cranberry pests, Productivity, Resistance breeding, Jackfruit, Oca etc, Millets, Root crops, Semen cryo

Guess what. Cranberry pests prefer certain varieties.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Estimating yield of food crops grown by smallholder farmers from IFPRI.
CIAT first CG centre to publish peer-reviewed video, on resistance selection. In other news, there are peer-reviewed videos?
CFTF draws our attention to Jackfruit – Forgotten Kalpavriksha, “a common trope”.
$3.4 million worth of good news for food security and diversity in the Andes. “Small Andean tuber crops” involved.
Minor millets star in new film shared by Bioversity.
Want the Philippines to be self-sufficient in rice? Eat rootcrops. IRRI unavailable for comment.
Way more than any sensible person will ever want to know about duck and goose semen.

June 23, 2011June 23, 2011

The future of rice in Mozambique

Readers with long memories who had time on their hands back in January may remember a post we did then on IR80482-64-3-3-3, a new rice tailor-made for Mozambique. There was some discussion at the time about the claims being made in the original SciDevNet piece about the new variety on which we based our post, but what really struck me was this statement:

Work began when the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), in the Philippines, sent Mozambique 11,200 rice varieties for testing.

That just sounded like quite a lot of varieties, and I remember wondering at the time how long it took the Mozambique national rice programme to get through that little lot. But anyway, I bring this up now not only because someone from IRRI has very kindly left a comment on the original post. But also because IR80482-64-3-3-3 is back in the news, cannily renamed Makassane. The IRRI press release has been widely picked up.

Following the approval of Makassane for release by the Mozambique Variety Release Committee earlier this month, IRRI provided government agencies and farmers “foundation seed” to use in bulking up the seed so that more can be produced and distributed to more farmers.

Two things about this. First, I look forward to regular updates on Makassane’s uptake by farmers. And second, I hope the IRRI and Mozambique national genebanks are confident that they already have good representation of the local landraces. Sophie, who left the aforementioned comment, says there are 76 rice types from Mozambique at IRRI. Genesys gives us just over 120 worldwide, between landraces and wild species, but only a few are geo-referenced (see map).