Category: Genebanks

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Pavlovsk becomes myth

The pack is well and truly on the scent now, with The Guardian in London and ABC in Australia weighing in, to say nothing of assorted ad-farms and feed scrapers. As they do so, strange claims are being made.

That Pavlovsk is “the world’s first global seed bank,” for example. It isn’t. But that does not diminish its importance of the Russian state’s short-sightenedness one bit.

And that “[t]welve Russian scientists starved to death at the site while protecting the crops”. They didn’t. They starved to death at the VIR’s headquarters in Leningrad proper.

Nits being picked, I agree, just as I’ve previously picked the “seed bank” nits. The heroism of the past is important and should never be forgotten, but it detracts from the argument that collections like Pavlovsk are even more important for the future. The forest fires raging in Russia during the hottest summer on record by far will burn themselves out. The need to adapt food and farming systems to climate change, using the genetic diversity of places like Pavlovsk, will not.

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Pavlovsk finally in the news, again

Priceless or worthless?

Absolutely nothing material has changed in the circumstances surrounding the possible destruction of the Pavlovsk Experiment Station, which we first blogged about in April. The hearing date — when courts will decide whether the land should be bulldozed to make way for private houses, destroying the world’s largest genebank of fruits and berries — has come closer, of course. It is scheduled for 11 August, next Wednesday. And this morning the Global Crop Diversity Trust put out a new press release highlighting the imminent court case and adding to its public campaign to persuade the Russian Bear that berries are better than bungalows.

So, naturally, Pavlovsk is now in the news, for The Economist blogs, the BBC, Agence France Press, the NYT blogs, Bioversity International and bits of the blogosphere.

My absolute favourite bit of the stories is this quote from the Trust’s Press Release:

In a bit of Kafkaesque logic, the property developers maintain that because it contains a “priceless collection,” no monetary value can be assigned to Pavlovsk Station, so, therefore, it is essentially worthless. Furthermore, the Federal Fund of Residential Real Estate Development has argued that the collection was never officially registered and thus it does not officially exist.

Against this level of sophistry, what hope can mere letters, tweets and petition signatures have? Having said which, it would be nice to pleasantly surprised on Wednesday, or shortly thereafter. ((And kudos to those who have tweeted and written; see our sidebar for the roll of honour.))

The BBC’s story echoes a point made by Sergey Alexanian of the Vavilov Institute, that as the land is for sale, one way to save the collection would be for the Vavilov Institute to simply buy the sites.

“It’s a huge amount of money,” [Alexanian] said. “Right now, it’s not the best time for the Russian science, financially speaking, so buying it would be ideal – but it’s impossible.”

How about one of those newly-minted philanthrocapitalists making the impossible possible?

One final point. Many people out there are referring to Pavlovsk as a seed bank. This is not quite the whole truth. It is a field genebank, in which almost all the varieties are stored as living plants in the ground. This is necessary because most of the varieties do not breed true from seed. So the only way to maintain the varieties is as plants. Seeds would store the entire genetic diversity of the population, it is true, and could be easily moved, but seeds cannot be used to regenerate the specific package of associated genes that makes up a variety. It is those varieties that have been studied and characterized over the decades at Pavlovsk. It is the studies and the varieties to which they are attached that make the collection so important.

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I’m just wild about saffron

We’ve Nibbled the crocusbank — a global collection of Crocus sativus funded by the EU and hosted in Cuenca, Spain — before. So it is good to be able to bring you an update from José Antonio Fernández, Crocusbank Coordinator. ((The photo is copyright José Antonio Fernández.))

There’s a lot of fascinating information in the article. The genebank itself currently contains 454 accessions, 197 of them saffron crocus from 15 different countries and the rest wild relatives from more than 50 crocus species. And I had no idea that there were quite so many Protected Denominations of Origin for saffron; 7 granted and at least 5 more on the way. Which is a puzzle …

C. sativus is a sterile triploid. That is going to make using the assembled diversity to breed a little more difficult, and raises definite questions about how much diversity is represented in the collection, because the plant reproduces asexually and is generally propagated by replanting the little offsets that form at the base of the corm. Asexual reproduction of this sort does not usually give rise to much genetic diversity, and so it has proved. Back in March we briefly Nibbled “Many saffron clones identical shock,” a preliminary report on the work of Professor Pat Heslop-Harrison at Leicester University in England.

Saffron is all hand-harvested, hand processed and dried in different ways, which is why saffron from the major growing areas of Spain, Italy, Greece, Iran or Kashmir all have different qualities and characteristics.

What we’ve been looking at is the genetic diversity within the different types of saffron that are grown and we have found that many of the clones grown worldwide are genetically identical. It’s only the processing that makes the product different.

That and, perhaps, terroir. So, does the genebank need to keep all those genetically identical accessions of saffron crocus, or might it be sufficient to preserve only the knowledge of how to harvest, process and dry the saffron in all those different ways? How would you do that anyway?

There are, of course, some genetically diverse accessions, which are coming under closer scrutiny to discover “their special characteristics, and why they’ve dropped out of production in many of the world’s saffron producing areas”.

There are other mysteries, too, such as the parents of the saffron crocus. One is believed to be C. cartwrightianus, which has similar large stigmas, but the other remains unknown. If it can be identified, it might be possible to recreate the saffron crocus from its wild ancestors, as has been done for bread wheat, which could offer a whole new range of diversity to saffron growers.

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Feeding you the Pavlovsk feed

Our ever-attentive reader will have noticed today’s Nibble on the TweetMedvedev campaign. It refers to an effort to save the priceless collection of fruits and berries at the Vavilov Institute’s Pavlovsk Station, just outside St Petersburg. Do please tweet President Medvedev, as suggested by Cary Fowler in his latest Huffington Post piece. To further highlight this important initiative, we are also bringing you a feed of a search on Twitter for the #Pavlovsk hashtag. Just scroll down the right sidebar past the featured comment box. We’re here to serve.

Tweet this: @KremlinRussia_E Mr. President, protect the future of food – save #Pavlovsk Station! http://huff.to/pavlsk