My recent post about lighting strikes in a coconut genebank was picked up by the excellent Coconut Google Group and generated some interesting responses. In particular, there’s a comment from Charles Clement of the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil recounting how a high-velocity wind blast — an Amazonian wind storm — took out a large chunk of his peach palm (Bactris gasipaes) genebank. Ex situ conservation in field genebanks can be a risky business indeed. The solutions are clear: more replications within collections, cleverly distributed in space; safety duplication of the entire collection somewhere else entirely (in vitro or as seeds as appropriate); and complementary conservation in situ. But that all costs money. I would say that most food crop accessions maintained in field genebanks around the world are unique. Take coconut. The Coconut Genetic Resources Database records 1416 accessions from 28 genebanks in 23 countries. More than 600 of them are represented by a single accession.
Seed conservation: cold, or dry?
Another fine guest post from Jacob van Etten.
Places with extreme conditions are good for conservation, whether it be Timbuktu with its dry, hot climate for books or Spitsbergen with its freezing cold for crop seeds. Next year the seeds will start to come to Spitsbergen from across the world to stock the “doomsday seed vaultâ€. Right now the vault is being cooled down, to be reaching -18°C soon.
Low temperatures are key to ex situ conservation of seeds. Cold chambers and freezers stuffed with seeds are found near any plant scientist around the world. The Svalbard project is not only unique because of the size of the vault but also because of its location. The low temperatures on the island will make the vault less expensive to cool as well as less vulnerable to energy failure, a common preoccupation of seed bank managers in those countries where tropical temperatures, unreliable energy networks and unpaid bills tend to converge. An alternative solution, however, seems to be on the horizon. The latest Technology Quarterly section of The Economist runs an interesting story about dry storage of biological materials at room temperature. Wrapped in polymers or sugars, DNA molecules are less vulnerable to degeneration. Perhaps this technology will also be available to seeds some day?
Lightning strikes coconuts twice (and more)
I’m still in the Philippines, but I’ve moved from rice to coconuts. That’s in terms of what I’m discussing, not what I’m eating. I’m participating in a meeting of the curators of the five different regional components of the International Coconut Genebank, organized by COGENT. There’s a lot of interesting stuff coming out, but what I wanted to share with you now (it’s actually the afternoon tea break) is something that was shown earlier today ((By Roland Bourdeix of CIRAD.)) to illustrate the problems that conservation of coconuts in field genebanks can face.
The image below comes from Google Earth and shows a small piece of one of the largest and most important coconut genebanks in the world, at the Marc Delorme Research Station just outside Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Those large gaps in the otherwise beautifully laid out genebank were caused by lightning strikes! The labourers grow their cassava there now. I’d never heard of this particular threat to ex situ conserved agrobiodiversity. This particular parcel seems to have been particularly unlucky, attracting strikes repeatedly over the years.
A shattered genebank slowly comes back to life
You may remember Typhoon Xangsane, which hit the Philippines in deadly fashion just over a year ago, on 28 September 2006. It was given the Tagalog name Milenyo, or Millennium.
What you may not know is that one of the victims of Milenyo was the national genebank of the Philippines — the National Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory — which is housed by the Institute of Plant Breeding in Los Baños. ((The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is also in Los Baños, of course, but although some of its facilities were also affected by Milenyo, its genebank was not damaged.))
Some of the results of the typhoon can be seen in the photo essay published by GRAIN not long after the event. Some 70% of the national collection was declared lost and the rest taken next door to IRRI for emergency storage under “black box” conditions.
I visited the genebank last Friday, and the recovery has definitely made some progress, including as a result of some timely financial assistance by the Global Crop Diversity Trust. But there’s still some way to go: much of the collection is still at IRRI for safe keeping.
In this picture, Nestor, who works at the genebank, shows how high the water got on that fateful day. You can also see, closer to the ground, the mark left by the mud which flowed through the building.
Continue reading “A shattered genebank slowly comes back to life”
Tasty rice
I’m at IRRI in the Philippines the whole week (and the next, actually, but that’s another story) for a workshop to develop a global ex situ conservation strategy for rice genetic resources. More on that later. Right now, I just wanted to show you a photo I took today during a rice variety tasting the T.T. Chang Genetic Resources Centre laid on. There were about 20 different genotypes from around the world: normal and fragrant, white and black, loose and very sticky. They included Carolina Gold, which I blogged about a few days ago. It’s amazing how different rice varieties can taste.