- Cardamom scrutinised.
- A Lifeboat to the Gene Pool. Our friend Dr Dag “provides some of the first experimental evidence to support the FIGS concept”. With slides.
- Descriptor lists are important, says Bioversity today. No joke.
- An investigation, quite possibly partisan, but that’s the point, into emergency seed aid to Haiti after the earthquake.
Nutritionist tells researchers what to eat shock
According to a report over at the Vaviblog, Bioversity’s nutritionist Jessica Fanzo was beset by questioners after her talk at the Vavilov Institute mentioned both the bad nutritional status of most Russians and the high nutritional value of some fruits and berries at the threatened Pavlovsk Experiment Station. She was bombarded with requests for advice. The Vaviblog’s correspondent reports:
One response stuck in my mind. Jessica was asked whether one couldn’t get all the vitamins and minerals one needs from pills. She said yes, but you have to get everything else from food, so why not the vitamins as well, by choosing your food better?
Especially if you like your potatoes processed and potable.
Nibbles: Gardening, Seed Swap, Mapping, Animal Genebank, Rice, Seed Treay, Nanocellulose, Camels, Bread, food Security
- Gardening is good for you. It’s official. And they didn’t even measure nutrition.
- European seed swap in Brussels.
- More fun for mappers; Training Kit on Participatory Spatial Information Management and Communication. h/t CAPRi
- Australian animal genebank under threat.
- Filipinos ♥ IRRI.
- Big write up of Seed Treaty‘s recent Governing Body meeting in Bali.
- Wired magazine goes nuts for bananas and other fruits as sources of better plastics.
- Camelicious! The worlds first large-scale camel dairy farm.
- Food strikes in ancient Egypt. They’ve been revolting for more than 3000 years.
- Nice round-up of how indigenous communities in Colombia are protecting their food security.
The John Innes Centre reaches out to genebank users
The Germplasm Resources Unit at the John Innes Centre has a new e-newsletter that you can subscribe to. The first issue is just out, and it’s well worth reading. Just to give the lie to my contention, expressed not a day back, that genebanks and users don’t talk enough, the newsletter is described…
…as a further channel of communication with our user community and raise awareness of recent activities and to flag the work of the collections and what we can offer. In this edition we highlight some of our activities of the past growing season while also providing a flavour of some of the work we are planning for 2011.
Germplasm documentation is a two way street
I don’t blame Pat Helsop-Harrison for not donning the fire-proof suit to find his Ug99 resistant lines, or whatever. I really don’t. Why would anyone venture into Genebank Database Hell, when they have such a friend in Google? I only do it myself because, well, I get paid to. But although the genebank community bears some of the responsibility for this situation, and is indeed trying to do something about it, part of the problem lies, I’m sorry to say, with the users of the data.
I’ll give you an example. Over at Vaviblog Jeremy has a post about the domestication of African rice. He describes some fancy DNA work from researchers in China who pinpointed the area of domestication of Oryza glaberrima by comparing the sequences of 14 genes in 20 accessions of the cultigen with 20 accessions of the progenitor, O. barthii. And where did they get that material?
All accessions were obtained from seeds provided by the Genetic Resources Center of the International Rice Research Institute at Los Baños, Philippines.
That’s great, of course. This kind of research use of the international collections is exactly what one wants to see. That’s what they’re there for. But when I asked IRRI about this, they said that “these authors aren’t included in the names of recipients in our database.” So they must have got the seed indirectly in some way. Again, fine. But when users use seed from a genebank like this, it would benefit everyone — the genebank itself, future users — if they fed back their results in some way, to add to the store of information the genebank has on its accessions.
Now, not all genebanks make this as easy to do as they could. That’s why we have on occasion suggested a social networking approach to germplasm documentation, to resounding silence. But users don’t go out of their way much either. Until the two communities come together more on this, the best way to find seeds will probably continue to be Google.