- A makeover for the potato.
- Mali’s farmers want improved landraces, not fancy-shmancy hybrids.
- Biofortified does Pollan. And Pollan does Oprah…
- The long-term consequences of introducing new genes to populations are not all that bad. Relevance for crop wild relatives? More research needed…
- The Dr. Cecilia Koo Botanic Conservation Center (KBCC) in Taiwan described.
- Almond tree produces poison in nectar to attract insects? Go figure. In other pollinator news, they’re declining in Central Europe.
- What would a world without domesticated livestock look like? ILRI DG questions vegetarians.
César Gómez Campo RIP
Prof. César Gómez Campo died in Madrid on September 5 last year. I’m sorry we didn’t note this earlier.
In 1966 César established the ‘‘Banco de Semillas de la Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Agrónomos de Madrid’’ (Seed Bank of the Higher Technical School of Agronomists of Madrid, in short: UPM Seed Bank), the first example ever of gene bank devoted to the conservation of wild species seeds. In César’s idea the long term ex situ conservation of wild taxa was a form of conservation of species endangered of extinction complementary to botanical gardens. In fact, his mind conceived this idea in a very modern way, that is including concepts of the genetic variation, in times when the concepts of nature conservation were at their very beginning.
That’s from the obituary at Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution, which is unfortunately behind a paywall except for the first page; everyone can, however, access Gómez Campo’s “essential” bibliography. He’s been described as a pioneer of the conservation of the Spanish flora, especially crop wild relatives, and that is true. But his work on ex situ conservation had an impact far beyond the Iberian peninsula.
Nibbles: City fish, Phylogenetics course, Andy got a brand new blog, Leather value-adding, Cod, Monastery gardens, Microbial collections, Cassava, Animal genebank, Biofuel
- Learn urban aquaculture.
- Learn phylogenetics online.
- Learn about the CGIAR’s manifesto for agriculture and climate change from Andy’s new blog.
- Learn about the importance of hide processing in East Africa.
- Learn about the latest blow to British cooking.
- Learn about monastic gardening.
- Learn about the USDA’s microbial collections. They’re agrobiodiversity too.
- Learn what is the latest crop to get its genome sequenced.
- Learn about a private livestock genebank in the US.
- Learn about the effect of biofuel crop diversity on insect diversity.
Bill Gates on genebanks and their databases
From Bill Gates’ annual letter on the work of his foundation:
There are three things that modern agrotechnology brings to this seed improvement process. The first is simply the ability to gather plant samples from all over the world and use databases to keep track of thousands of plants grown under different conditions.
The second is sequencing and the third is transgenics, in case you were wondering. One of these days, I’d like to take Mr Gates down into Genebank Database Hell. But hey, we’re working on it. And the Foundation is helping.
How old is that lentil?
You may remember yesterday’s nibble about the allegedly 4,000-year-old lentil from an archaeological site in Turkey which actually germinated. Intrigued, I ran the news item by some colleagues at Kew. They pointed me to a New Scientist article from a few years back which describes their attempt to verify a previous alleged example of very old seed (from the sarcophagus of an Egyptian mummy, in fact) germinating. The thing is, you can predict pretty well how seed will behave over time if you know the temperature and relative humidity of the conditions. You just plug those numbers into a fairly well known and understood equation.
Dickie found that if he started with top-quality seed and the temperature remained constant at 16 °C, one grain in a thousand might still germinate after 236 years. With the temperature sometimes hitting the high 20s, the grain would all be dead in 89 years. And if the seed was less than perfect to begin with…
So let’s just say I’ll be personally needing some fairly solid evidence for the age of that lentil.