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.
Breadfruit proceedings
Great news from Diane Ragone. The proceedings of the I International Symposium on Breadfruit Research and Development are out!
Seeds in the Antarctic
I have some more information on the seeds-in-the-Argentine-Antarctic story. A book was distributed yesterday at SIRGEALC entitled Avances de Investigación en Recursos Genéticos en el Cono Sur 2. It was put together by the regional plant genetic resources network for the Southern Cone (REGENSUR) and came out earlier this year. ((It should in due course appear on the publications page of the PROCISUR website, like its companion volume from 1999. PROCISUR is the regional agricultural research and development coordination mechanism for the Southern Cone.)) In it there’s a paper by BS Rosso and ME Ferrer, of one of Argentina’s agricultural research stations, describing a singular experiment.
It seems that, in 1983, batches of seed of maize and soyabean were dried, sealed into aluminium foil bags, placed in aluminium containers and left in ambient conditions at three research and military installations, two of then in the Argentine Antarctic ((The map will show you the location of Base Jubany, one of the sites.)) and one in southern mainland Argentina. Twenty years later, the seeds were tested for germinability. The samples left at the sites in the Antarctic, which enjoyed average temperatures of -18°C and -2°C, hardly degenerated at all in percentage germination. The seed batches left at 9.5°C did, substantially.
So I don’t think that germplasm is actually been safety duplicated under ambient conditions in the Argentine Antarctic. But it could be…
LATER: Well, maybe not. Marcelo Ferrer is here at SIRGEALC and I had a nice chat with him in front of his poster, which happened to be about maize characterization — he’s a maize breeder. I asked him whether, after his experiment, there were any plans to duplicate the Argentinian seed collections in the Antarctic. He said it would not be very practical. The only way to get to the bases is by sea, and then only for a short period each year. Some years, it’s not possible to get there at all because of the ice. Climate change may make access a bit easier, I guess, but you’d probably want your duplicate collection to be a little closer to hand.