- Bamboo microscope used to document rice varieties at Indian village genebank. Want one.
- And more documentation and conservation of traditional knowledge in India: this time it’s medicines.
- Nigel Chaffey’s latest botanical buffet table at the Annals of Botany has stuff on nomenclature and genomes. Always worth following.
- Latest on saving agarwood. And more. Thanks to twittering by @AsiaForestry.
- Biofortified blogs research on geneflow between crops and their wild relatives.
- Kentucky bluegrass pix. Botany Photo of the Day is also worth following. You guys all use Google Reader, right?
- “Any serious discussion of biodiversity conservation must include the diversity of crops and livestock…” Right on.
- Vavilov hits Abyssinia. Another one for Reader.
- Pollinator trends in Europe and the world. It ain’t good.
- Your botanic gardens needs at least 15 individuals of that palm.
Madeira genebank seems OK
While our sympathy goes out to the residents and tourists on Madeira, who have had to cope with the worst storms since 1993, we are pleased to have had some goodish news from our friend Eliseu Bettencourt. He managed to speak to colleagues at the CEM-UMa (Centre for Macaronesian Studies – University of Madeira) and was assured that colleagues and the ISOPlexis Genebank were OK, despite the terrible floods on Saturday 20 February. “The only thing that happened to the Genebank was a power cut for a few hours,” and that had no effect on the normal functioning of the cold rooms.
That is good news for the genebank and its staff. I wonder, though: is there a safety duplicate of the ISOPlexis collection at Svalbard, or anywhere else?
Nibbles: Irrigation squared, Saffron, Chickpeas, Coastal trees, Cucurbits
- Wanna grow plants in the Jordanian desert? Invest $250,000.
- Wanna grow plants in the Maharashtra summer? Invest $20.
- There’s a world saffron crocus collection. Who knew? A review is coming.
- Coloured chickpeas contain more antioxidants. Well, yeah.
- SciDev.net says scientists say coastal trees not much good against tsunamis, and may be bad news generally.
- Rhizowen crosses species barriers, develops ficifoliaphilia, poor chap.
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.
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.