Iron-tolerant rice

SciDev.net reports on a fascinating trial set to begin in May. Researchers in West Africa have selected about 80 different rice varieties from genebanks around the world. These will be planted in iron-rich soils in four countries: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea and Nigeria to see how they survive. Iron at the levels found in the trial plots would normally kill high-yielding rice varieties. The researchers will be looking for the five best varieties in each plot, and will be assisted in their search by local farmers who have agreed to participate in the variety selection. The best-performing varieties will then be given to the farmers to grow using their normal methods, to see whether they outperform traditional varieties.

An interesting aspect of the trial seems to be that the researchers are not looking for high-iron rice, which might help to address chronic anaemia. They want varieties that will yield well on high-iron soils, even if the rice itself remains iron poor. Increasing the mineral content (notably iron and zinc) of cereal crops remains an important breeding goal, complicated by the arcane relationships between soil levels, genotype, other soil chemistry and, probably, phases of the moon. There is impressive variation among accessions of wheat wild relatives and several methods have already been tried to make high-iron rice, which does actually reduce anemia. There are also traditional rice varieties that are high in iron.

Distributed herbarium documentation

Distributed computer projects are taking off in a big way. “Many are run on a volunteer basis, and involve users donating their unused computational power to work on interesting computational problems.” That usually means looking for extraterrestrial life or working out the structure of black holes or proteins while your computer idles away. Herbaria@home is a bit different. When you sign up as a volunteer, you receive scans of herbarium sheets, you digitize the label information, and these data are then added to the herbarium’s information system. Actually, there are other examples of such projects, which use the public’s spare brain-power, as well as their spare computer-power. I wonder if this approach could be used to improve genebank documentation. Perhaps to geo-reference tricky accessions? Or how about to characterize the morphology of different varieties from photos?

Submergence resistant rice on the airwaves

“It was not in use,” said Pamela Ronald. “Very, very low yield and very poor flavor, so no one was eating it. It’s really more like a grassy weed, but it had these properties.”

“It” is a rice from eastern India which was known ((By farmers, the article says. But then Dr Ronald says it was not in use. Was it information recorded by a conscientious germplasm collector?)) to survive under water. Listen on VOA to how Pamela Roland identified the sub gene in this variety and then introduced it into the popular Swarna.

“We wanted to hear what kind of difference it made to their families, and a couple of the women told me that they were able to feed their families and they had extra rice to sell, which is really important in those areas to bring in a little cash,” said Pamela Ronald.