Genebanks

June 24, 2025June 25, 2025

Noah? No way!

In the latest GROW webinar, Prof. Stef de Haan, of the International Potato Centre and more recently Wageningen University and Research, explains how genebanks alone won’t preserve crop diversity adequately unless linked with farmer custodians, local seed systems, and policy spaces. Sounds like he also falls squarely in the middle in the old Erna vs Otto bunfight.

To save you googling, the Rikuy Agrobio website he mentions, with the community-level tools for monitoring crop diversity, is here. And you can explore potato diversity in on-farm hotspots on wikiPapa here. Both only in Spanish so far, but well worth looking into. Fascinating stuff, and obviously valuable, but I do wonder how to scale up this sort of thing to all crops, everywhere.

June 17, 2025

Nibbles: Cherokee Three Sisters, Australian native grains, Ancient Peruvian irrigation, Indian apples, IFOAM Seed Platform, MSB, Chinese conservation, Protected areas, Soybeans breeding, Funding cuts

Three Sisters rematriated to historical Cherokee Nation.
Native grains returning to Indigenous land in Australia too.
May need to bring back agricultural practices too, like in Peru.
Meanwhile, in India, farmers are trying to grow apples in new places. Go figure.
Anyway, seems like the IFOAM Seeds Platform might be able to help.
And genebanks too of course, like the Millennium Seed Bank.
As part of a comprehensive conservation systems, goes without saying, like in China.
Which also include climate-proof protected areas.
It worked for soybeans, after all.
Well, for now anyway…

June 16, 2025June 16, 2025

Brainfood: Rice breeding, Sorghum parents, Cowpea diversity, Sweet potato double, Lesser yam uses, Tomato breeding, Peanut hybrids, Rice wild relatives, Sorghum genetic erosion

Future flooding tolerant rice germplasm: Resilience afforded beyond Sub1A gene. You want to make rapid breeding progress? You need the “Transition from Trait to Environment” approach. As far as I can tell, this means that you fix your trait of interest in a pool of elite parents before using it in proper yield breeding.
Prioritizing parents from global genebanks to breed climate-resilient crops. Yeah but how do you find your trait of interest in the first place. You start with passport and genotyping data from genebank collections of course.
Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L. Walp.) landraces in Mozambique and neighbouring Southern African countries harbour genetic loci with potential for climate adaptation. You see what I mean?
Genetic diversity and population structure of Colombian sweet potato genotypes reveal possible adaptations to specific environmental conditions. Ok, now do you see what I mean?
Genetic diversity analysis and duplicates identification of new sweetpotato accessions collected in China. Manage your duplicates though, right?
The lesser yam Dioscorea esculenta (Lour.) Burkill: a neglected crop with high functional food potential. This doesn’t have decent collections, let alone duplicates.
Molecular screening of wild and cultivated tomato germplasm reveals potential materials for multi-locus disease resistance breeding. Again, thank goodness for genebanks — plural.
First report on trait segregation in F1 hybrids between the cultivated peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) and the wild incompatible species A. glabrata Benth. I wonder if this could be used in tomato.
A blueprint for tapping the wild relatives for crop improvement: A success story of CWR-derived rice varieties, Nông Dân 1 and Nông Dân 2. No need for embryo rescue here. No word on the need for submergence tolerance.
Genetic diversity in in situ and ex situ collections of sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] landraces. Diversity is still out there, at least in India. Which is great. But how would you know without genebanks? And you need genebanks for breeders to use it.
And to cap things off, a new occasional feature: A ChatGPT-generated one-sentence summary of the week’s Brainfood. “To breed crops for climate resilience and future food security, you need to systematically mine, manage, and mobilize the diversity stored in genebanks—especially landraces and wild relatives—and integrate it into elite breeding pipelines using smart, trait-targeted strategies.”

June 11, 2025June 11, 2025

Modified ecosystems and the conservation of crop diversity

A new global assessment of the state of terrestrial ecosystems has just been published, focusing on the extent of human modification due to “industrial pressures based on agriculture, forestry, transportation, mining, energy production, electrical infrastructure, dams, pollution and human accessibility.” ¹

As is my wont, I tried to find a form of the data that I could shoehorn into Google Earth, but I failed. Fortunately GIS guru Kai Sonder of CIMMYT was able to snip out a kml file of overall human transformation as of 2020 covering Kenya — don’t ask me how. But thanks, Kai. I put on top of it genebank accessions from Kenya classified as wild or weedy in Genesys.

I don’t know quite what to make of this. The wild populations seem to have been mainly collected in areas that in 2020 were very highly affected by human activity. But is that good or bad?

It could be good — in a sense — if the high degree of human transformation means that the original populations are not there any more. ² Phew, good thing they were collected! On the other hand, it could be bad if the concentration on easily accessible and modified areas means that the genetic diversity currently being conserved is not representative of what’s out there.

What do you think?

But of course what I really want is a version of this which focuses on agricultural areas and is updated in real time. Yes, a perennial favourite here: a real early warning system for erosion of crop diversity.

June 11, 2025

Nibbles: Maize history, Maize in Tanzania, WorldVeg feature, Pigeonpea speed breeding, Valuing nature in food, GIAHS, Ancient Egyptian brewing redux

The history of maize — according to Pioneer.
The importance of maize — according to Dr Mujuni Sospeter Kabululu, Curator, National Plant Genetic Resources Centre—Tanzania.
The future of vegetables — according to WorldVeg.
The future of pigeonpea — according to ICRISAT.
How should we value nature in our food systems? By true cost accounting — according to TABLE.
A good way to value nature in our food systems is through recognizing Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems — according to FAO.
How strong was ancient Egyptian beer? Not very — according to ethnoarcheobotanists. But it’s still worth trying to reproduce it — according to me. Seneb!