- Bioversity and NBPGR India offering course on cryopreservation.
- Scientia Pro Publica #35 blog carnival is up, with bees factchecked up the wazoo.
- Big long post helps understand corn domestication dates in Chaco Canyon.
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. 1
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.
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
Nibbles: CGIAR “change”, Cuba, Data, Pavlovsk, Homegardens, Soil bacteria, Thai rice
- GFAR publishes list of Megaprogramme (or whatever they are called) consultations.
- Cuba’s Miscellaneous Crops Under-delegate Rolando Macias Cardenas reports on tomato paste. In other news, Cuba has a Miscellaneous Crops Under-delegate. No, wait, that’s not really news.
- While Sachs et al. moan about better agricultural data, CIAT go out and get it.
- The Pavlovsk TweetMedvedev campaign rolls on.
- “…maximum diversity can be conserved at an intermediate level of income” in Javanese bamboo-tree homegardens.
- Right, so trees “farm” bacteria. What some people will write in a press release.
- Thailand’s rice farmers trying to cope with climate change. Like they have a choice.
Can Science Feed the World?
That’s the question posed by the title of a big splash in Nature. The answer, in case you don’t want to work your way through the various contributions, as summarized in a handy pamphlet, is yes, by enabling sustainable intensification, although not on its own. So nothing wildly new there. Also not new is that once again agrobiodiversity gets the shaft. One of the articles does focus on plant breeding, but it doesn’t mention the need to ensure the long-term availability of its raw material — crop and livestock genetic diversity, including that in genebanks. There’s also a piece by Jeffrey Sachs and numerous co-authors on the need for better global monitoring of agriculture, which doesn’t mention the desirability of monitoring levels of agricultural biodiversity on-farm. Oh well.