- MSSRF’s big push to restore traditional rice varieties and other crops to farmers in Malabar.
- Abu Dhabi’s big push to genebank all its plant heritage.
- CAS/IP’s big push to learn from failure: papaya variety licensing.
Restoration is germplasm use too
It is well known that plant populations do best when they grow close to where they originally came from. A myriad reciprocal transplant experiments going back decades attests to the power of local adaptation. But how close is close? The question is of very real practical importance if you’re trying to restore a habitat. By definition, the local population is gone. What is the maximum distance you should be willing to go to collect material to re-establish it?
Three hundred kilometers is the answer given in a paper just out in Ecological Applications. ((Travis, S., & Grace, J. (2010). Predicting performance for ecological restoration: a case study using Spartina alterniflora Ecological Applications, 20 (1), 192-204 DOI: 10.1890/08-1443.1)) There’s also a discussion over at Conservation Maven. The authors worked on the salt marsh grass Spartina alterniflora, which is commonly used in ecological restoration of wetlands in North America. They collected germplasm at 23 sites from Texas to Maine, genotyped them using neutral markers, and then grew them all in a “common garden” experiment in Louisiana, where they measured in various ways how well each population did. The control was a population just across a canal from the experimental site.
It turned out that clone diameter, number of stems and number of inflorescences at the experimental site, as well as genetic distance, were all significantly affected by measures of the geographic distance between the source and the experimental site. For populations up to about 300km away along the coast, performance in the common garden was similar to the control. Go further, and the source populations do not do as well where they are planted.
The authors make quite specific recommendations for restoration. Use material from at least three populations within 300km of the restoration site, and 100km if you want material that is not only maximally locally adapted but also not significantly genetically different from the original population at the restoration site.
Now, I don’t know how widely applicable these recommendations might be. I don’t know the restoration literature at all. A cursory look revealed a fairly well-developed theoretical framework, the “restoration gene pool concept.” Which has been used to develop a decision support tool.
As I say, I don’t know much about restoration. So I don’t know to what extent this sort of thing has been applied to crop wild relatives. To me, “use” of crop wild relative germplasm means use in breeding. But that is clearly very narrow thinking, and I should be ashamed of myself.
Agricultural biodiversity conservation and use in the spotlight at IITA
The latest edition of IITA’s R4D Review has various articles on agrobiodiversity issues, including a roundup of the activities of the centre’s genebank and an interview with its manager, Dr Dominique Dumet.
Battling it out over drought-tolerant maize in Africa
Maize in Africa is becoming a bit of a battlefield in the agri-culture wars. The BBC has a radio programme on the Water Efficient Maize for Africa project, which is a partnership between national programmes, CIMMYT and Monsanto, with a lot of work being done in Kenya. Predictably, it is very biotechnology-oriented, with marker-assisted selection and genetic modification to the fore.
At the other end of the spectrum, Scientific American has an article on a GEF project (funding comes also from Norway and the Netherlands) at Sakai, Kenya which is very different.
Agricultural extension officers now offer seasonal and locally relevant climate predictions explained in simple terms in Kikamba, the regional tribal language. They are now producing a handbook to translate weather predictions into practical advice about what and when to plant.
The project has also helped farmers set up a seed bank. A group of about 40 men will collect, process and preserve the best local seeds and loan them out again during the next planting season, slowly selecting for the best climate-adapted varieties.
Sakai’s farmers are hedging their bets. Increasingly, they are diversifying their crops by planting more drought-tolerant grains, peas and beans.
One wonders whether the two projects are even aware of each other, let alone talking. Maybe someone will tell us.
Evaluating St John’s wort not as easy as it sounds
USDA researchers at Ames, Iowa are screening 180 accessions of St Johns wort (Hypericum) for biologically active compounds. I hope they’ll take into account phase of the moon in their evaluations:
Research on St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum, Hypericaceae) herb, one of the top ten herbal products in retail sales in the United States, has shown seasonal variation and differences due to cultivation location. Levels of hypericin and pseudohypericin, the compounds to which commercial products are usually standardized, were found to vary from 100 ppm to 5000 ppm from winter to summer. This remarkable quantitative difference in compounds could account for some of the differences in commercial products whose raw materials are usually from multiple sources. Additional studies with St. John’s wort found significant variation among wild and cultivated plants sourced from around the world.