Category: Genebanks

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Crop improvement in the news

Two stories of collaborative crop improvement — past, present and future — and the genebanks that underpin it to end the week with.

From an IRRI press release out today on IRRI’s collaboration with the Philippines:

Filipino farmers have adopted more than 75 IRRI-bred high-yielding rice varieties since 1960, have greatly improved their fertilizer and pest management strategies, and are implementing water-saving technologies.

It is telling that a particular point is made of the Filipino material in the IRRI genebank.

…in the International Rice Genebank housed at IRRI, 4,670 rice samples from the Philippines are conserved, including 4,070 traditional varieties, 485 modern varieties, and 115 wild relatives — all are available to share with Filipino farmers and scientists.

And from USDA’s Agricultural Research magazine, Feb. 2010 edition:

Of 1,768 heirloom wheats submitted since 2005, only 78 (or 4.4 percent) showed resistance to Ug99 at the Njoro site. Still, the prescreening led to identification of more Ug99-resistant wheat accessions than would’ve been achieved from sending randomly selected accessions for testing, says Bonman. This is evidenced by the fact that 7 percent of wheat lines resistant to U.S. races showed rust resistance in Kenya, yet only 1 percent of randomly selected accessions did.

I’ll be travelling for the next couple of weeks and blogging may be sparse.

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The tribe of genebankers gets a visit

Peter [Curran] meets the botanists who won the lottery. Seed conservation used to be rather marginal to the main scientific activity at The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. That is, until, the scientists who preserve seeds for future generations asked for and received 30 million pounds.

It’s a BBC programme and you have 7 days left to listen to it. It provides an interesting insight into a particular, albeit unique, genebank — if you can get past Mr Curran’s sardonic attitude.

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Save seeds, Kenyan tells Japan

Wangari Maathai, tree-hugger and board member of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, has been in Japan seeking Japan’s leadership for the conservation of agricultural biodiversity, in advance of the Nagoya meeting of the parties to the Conference of Biological Diversity in October.

“If we don’t protect what we have, you never know what the scientists of tomorrow will need” to allow people to produce crops that could not grow before, she said, adding, “That is why these diversities are important.” She talked about her visit to a Kyoto temple where she learned the Japanese word “tomoiki,” which refers to the concept of coexistence with nature, and said it is “something the world needs to learn.” Maathai became widely known for adopting the Japanese word “mottainai” — loosely meaning “You should save it” — in trying to promote awareness of environmental protection among Japanese people.

Nice word, mottainai.

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Assuming genebanks

Most crop geneticists agree that enrichment of the cultivated gene pool will be necessary to meet the challenges that lie ahead. However, to fully capitalize on the extensive reservoir of favorable alleles within wild germplasm, many advances are still needed. These include increasing our understanding of the molecular basis for key traits, expanding the phenotyping and genotyping of germplasm collections, improving our molecular understanding of recombination in order to enhance rates of introgression of alien chromosome regions, and developing new breeding strategies that permit introgression of multiple traits. Recent progress has shown that each of these challenges is tractable and within reach if some of the basic problems limiting the application of new technologies can be tackled.

That’s from Breeding Technologies to Increase Crop Production in a Changing World, part of the recent Science special feature on food security. Sure, the challenges of use are tractable. But what if those germplasm collections are inadequate in their coverage, accessibility, management or funding? As ever, genebanks are pretty much taken for granted in these sorts of discussions.

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Competition for Svalbard?

A world class seed vault has been established on the Siachen Glacier to preserve India’s biological wealth for future generations, Dr. Ajay Parida, Executive Director, M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation confirmed on Saturday.

The vault, which has a natural temperature between -20 and -40 celsius, will hold samples of rice, pulses, peas and beans and can be used for building food programmes across the nation.

This was at a meeting in which the Norwegian Minister of Agriculture and Food Lars Peder Brekk also participated. I wonder if Mr Brekk mentioned the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.