Ethiopia’s Institute of Biodiversity Conservation (IBC) has a nice new website. Interestingly, it includes an interactive feature called BioForum. I was surprised, however, to see no reference to the Standard Material Transfer Agreement (SMTA) in the section on access. Since Ethiopia has been a Party to the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture since 2003, IBC should be using the SMTA for transfers of Annex 1 material, surely.
Carolina Gold
In the early 1700’s, rice was South Carolina’s main export — no wonder the variety grown was called Carolina Gold. But where did it come from?
The first reported import in the New World of what is thought to be Carolina Gold occurred in 1685, when a slave ship from Madagascar unloaded a cargo of rice in Charleston, South Carolina.
So was that Indian Ocean island the ultimate source of Carolina Gold? USDA geneticists think they know, and have written about it in a new paper. Anna McClung and Robert Fjellstrom looked for molecular markers for Carolina Gold among the material in USDA rice germplasm collection. The best genetic fit — confirmed by close morphological similarity — was actually with an accession from Ghana, not Madagascar.
Questions remain. Maybe material from Carolina — originally derived from somewhere else — found its way back to Africa.
But geographer Judith Carney of the University of California, Los Angeles, says a Ghanaian origin of Carolina Gold fits with the idea that Carolina Gold arrived in the colony as food on slave ships and was then planted by the slaves.
Efforts are underway to bring this historical variety back into commercial cultivation.
Potato taxonomy
Quick quiz: How many species of cultivated potatoes are there?
A maize tour
SIRGEALC over, Marleni, David and I headed for CIMMYT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre. That’s in Texcoco, about an hour’s drive from the hotel where we were staying in Mexico City (or three hours, unfortunately, on the way back). It turned out to be something of a maize odyssey. I’ll tell the story in pictures.
When we got to Texcoco, it was too early for lunch, but that didn’t stop us spending some time in the market sampling the local cuisine, as the quesadillas there are famous. This lady certainly made us some great ones. Note the two types of maize she’s using.
Cooling begins at Svalbard genebank
Arctic monkeys start to chill.