- New guy in charge Peter Wenzl gives us his vision for the CIAT genebank.
- Agriculture and Irrigation Minister of Peru gives us his vision for the Peruvian genebank.
- CIMMYT’s annual report gives us a vision of conserving maize in Guatemala.
- Farmer Somashekhara gives us his vision for finger millet farming in India. And two makes a trend…
- Retired agriculture expert Malcolm Hazelman gives us his vision for Samoan gardens.
- A Tagorean vision of radical relocalization involving perennial edimentals.
- Lots of people give us their vision for saving the wild apple.
- IFPRI gives us their vision for the future of food in a changing world. With infographic goodness.
- Natalie Mueller et al. give us their vision for reviving the forgotten crops of the Eastern Agricultural Complex.
- A vision of a planet protected in situ, in multiple ways. Yes, even pigeons. And yes, even cities, though agrobiodiversity neglected as usual.
- A vision of permanent identifiers everywhere.
- DNA gives us a vision of domestication explained. Yes, even sugarcane.
Brainfood: Wild foods, Maize in Guatemala, Wild lentils, Sorghum gaps, Ethiopian erosion, Chikanda barcoding, Brazil nut systems, Wild carrots, Ancient wild potato use, Wild wheat grains
- The role of wild fruits and vegetables in delivering a balanced and healthy diet. Not great, until they’re domesticated.
- Maize Diversity, Market Access, and Poverty Reduction in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. Forget maize.
- Evaluation of Wild Lentil Species as Genetic Resources to Improve Drought Tolerance in Cultivated Lentil. Environment explained drought response in wild lentils better than molecular classification.
- Geographical distribution, diversity and gap analysis of East African sorghum collection conserved at the ICRISAT genebank. Both Sudans.
- Explaining the Ethiopian farmers’ perceptions on potential loss of traditional crop varieties: A principal components regression analysis. Poor farmers know more, and care more, about loss of traditional landraces.
- High-throughput sequencing of African chikanda cake highlights conservation challenges in orchids. Those are very biodiverse cakes, but not in a good way.
- Revisiting the ‘cornerstone of Amazonian conservation’: a socioecological assessment of Brazil nut exploitation. It’s actually in pretty good shape, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.
- Phylogenetic Prediction of Alternaria Leaf Blight Resistance in Wild and Cultivated Species of Carrots. Look for taller material in clade A.
- Starch granule evidence for the earliest potato use in North America. S. jamesii may have been used for 10,000 years in Utah.
- Genome-Wide Association Study of Grain Architecture in Wild Wheat Aegilops tauschii. Two genetic lineages, with big differences in grain width and weight.
Brainfood: Taste breeding, Cat domestication, ITPGRFA in USA, CWR extravaganza, Ecology & ag, Brassica identification, Biodiversity monitoring, Languages, Species recovery, Benin pigeonpea
- Sensory sacrifices when we mass-produce mass produce. You need consumer-assisted selection.
- The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world. Two Middle-Eastern sub-populations of one sub-species contributed to domestication, at different times, and the result spread first with agriculture and then aboard ships. But we haven’t changed them in the same way we’ve changed dogs etc. You don’t say.
- U.S. ratification of Plant Treaty: benefit sharing ambiguity for plant genomics researchers does not change. But what about genomics data?
- Wading Into the Gene Pool: Progress and Constraints Using Wild Species. Introduction to the Special Section on CWR.
- Plant ecological solutions to global food security. Introduction to the Special Feature on Ecological Solutions to Global Food Security. The intersection with the above is probably here.
- A multiplex PCR for rapid identification of Brassica species in the triangle of U. Now there’s no excuse.
- Connecting Earth observation to high-throughput biodiversity data. I don’t see any reason why the same thinking couldn’t be applied to crop diversity.
- Linguistic diversity of natural UNESCO world heritage sites: bridging the gap between nature and culture. 80% of Natural WHSs intersect at least one indigenous language.
- Overcoming barriers to active interventions for genetic diversity. Embrace the hybrid by focusing on process, not form.
- Utilization and farmers’ knowledge on pigeonpea diversity in Benin, West Africa. For some reason, farmers don’t like coloured seeds.
Brainfood: Banana GWAS, MGIS, Commodification and racialization, Native tree seeds, Tea in China, Potato in China, Indian eggplant, Rapid phenotyping, Ag & environment
- Trait variation and genetic diversity in a banana genomic selection training population. You can use easy-to-measure traits as proxies for important but difficult-to-measure traits. Both of which will hopefully end up in…
- MGIS: managing banana (Musa spp.) genetic resources information and high-throughput genotyping data. Very cool. So when can we expect the data in Genesys?
- Heirloom rice in Ifugao: an ‘anti-commodity’ in the process of commodification. Calling a landrace a “heirloom variety” is just another form of capitalist oppression.
- Race, Status, and Biodiversity: The Social Climbing of Quinoa. Not to mention racist.
- To what extent are genetic resources considered in environmental service provision? A case study based on trees and carbon sequestration. Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) afforestation/reforestation project design documents are often unrealistic about the chances of sourcing sufficient quantity and quality of seeds of indigenous species.
- Diversity analysis on catechin genetic of wild tea plant from Yunnan province. They determine whether a variety is used for green or black tea.
- Genetic differences between potato strains introduced from International Potato Center (CIP) and domestic potato resources by SSR molecular markers. The CIP varieties are quite different to the Chinese ones. But we kinda knew that.
- SSR marker analysis points to population admixture and continuum of genetic variation among Indian landraces of brinjal (Solanum melongena L.). Brinjal gets moved around a lot.
- A high-throughput, field-based phenotyping technology for tall biomass crops. Estimate plant height and stem diameter in sorghum, say, without leaving the office.
- Comparative analysis of environmental impacts of agricultural production systems, agricultural input efficiency, and food choice. Better for environment to change dietary habits than production systems.
Using crop wild relatives in situ for improving sugar beet
Thanks to Brian Ford-Lloyd, Emeritus Professor of Plant Conservation Genetics at the School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, for this contribution, hopefully the first of many.
Aside from beet cyst nematode, rhizomania is the most important disease of sugar beet worldwide, having plagued growers since the early 1950s. It can only be combated by growing resistant varieties, and there are two known major genes conferring resistance, one having been discovered by conventional means in the sugar beet crop, and the other in wild sea beet (Beta vulgaris ssp. maritima) populations in northern Europe. In a recent publication, Capistrano-Gossmann et al. (2017) have identified the actual wild beet gene involved (Rz2), using a complex but powerful molecular genetic process, a modified version of mapping-by-sequence together with the generation of a draft genome sequence and fine mapping. ((Gina G. Capistrano-Gossman et al. Crop wild relative populations of Beta vulgaris allow direct mapping of agronomically important genes. Nature Communications 8:15708. DOI:10.1038/ncomms15708))
But let’s leave aside the detailed methodology, including what the gene actually encodes! As far as readers of this blog are concerned, what is the significance of this piece of research? It all started with the existing knowledge that a large population of sea beet in Denmark contained some plants that showed the resistance trait, and in my recollection this population had been studied for many years. But success depended upon sampling plants (189 of them) directly from the in situ population that covered a stretch of at least 10 kilometers of the Danish coast. The magic is that, compared to conventional synthetic breeding populations, this wild population possessed a distinct benefit — many generations of ‘random’ outcrossing resulted in low linkage disequilibrium and high population admixture. This was the key to successfully fine-mapping and genomically pinpointing the causal gene within the beet DNA sequence.
As the authors rightly point out, their research not only demonstrates the value of crop wild relatives, but it also highlights the need for ensuring that populations of these wild relatives are adequately conserved in their natural habitats and are subjected to appropriate and detailed evaluation for useful traits.
There are some important points that arise from this. Firstly, this particular use of a crop wild relative is not direct in the sense of transferring the gene by way of a plant breeding programme, but lies in the molecular isolation of the gene, that could then be subsequently transferred by whatever means, including genetic manipulation of one sort or another. Secondly, ‘evaluation’ of germplasm conserved in situ is something that has not received much attention, to my knowledge. And thirdly, preserving the population’s size and integrity would be important in maintaining its population genetic structure and ‘power’. Allowing it to go through a genetic bottleneck would diminish its value.
It is fortunate that wild sea beet is not categorised by IUCN as being under threat and large outbreeding populations do exist. The genetic potential of one or two other wild beets (Beta patula, for example), with smaller population sizes, is more in question.