Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The USDA is promising people like Luigi ((Remember when he was Lost in Genebank database hell?)) a get out of hell free card. Shiaoman Chao, a molecular geneticist, sequences and fingerprints thousands of wheat and barley samples sent to her by breeders around the country. The results can help breeders to decide whether a particular seedling is worth persevering with.
But those data on their own become much more valuable when they can be married to other kinds of information from other kinds of laboratory. Enter GrainGenes, “a treasure trove of genetic information about wheat, barley and other ‘small grains’ like rye, oats and triticale”.
Personally, I don’t have the knowledge to make use of GrainGenes, or any of the other massive portals dedicated to just a few crops each: maize, strawberry, potato and others. But there is help out there.
The bigger question is the extent to which all those portals can be brought together and interlinked with other kinds of data: where selections grow, their visible characteristics, their utility, etc. etc. I know there are people coming at this from the non-molecular side of things, but I do sometimes wonder whether they really have the chops (and the resources) to pull it off. If some of the gene-jockeys decided they wanted to do it, and could throw some of their brains, brawn and bucks at the problem, I reckon Luigi would have his lifeline sooner. And it might be more reliable.
I found this in a post at the Permaculture Research Institute, USA. The video is rather good, I reckon, although there were a couple of parts where I disagreed with the subtitling. More worrying, I think, is the sub-text. Do the Indians need a foreigner to teach them to save seeds? To get them access to traditional varieties from all over, that they can then trial in their own systems. Why no mention of the fact that what Stephan Fayon is doing in India, he could not do legally in France? Kokopelli India is an offshoot of Kokopelli Seed Foundation, which is a US vehicle to support the aims of Association Kokopelli in France. Amazingly, Association Kokopelli has had nothing new to say about its euros 35,000 fine for “unfair trading” since the fine was levied. It’s all very odd.
