- Relating dietary diversity and food variety scores to vegetable production and socio-economic status of women in rural Tanzania. Dietary diversity was all too often alarmingly low, and when it was it was associated with seasonal fluctuations in the production and collecting of vegetables. But a more varied diet need not necessarily be healthier, so more procedural sophistication will be necessary in follow-up studies.
- A risk-minimizing argument for traditional crop varietal diversity use to reduce pest and disease damage in agricultural ecosystems of Uganda. For Musa and beans, more varietal diversity meant less damage and less variation in damage.
- Exploring farmers’ local knowledge and perceptions of soil fertility and management in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. Soils which farmers described as being more fertile were, ahem, more fertile.
- Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Important because they can confer protection from natural enemies, among other things. They behave a bit, but not entirely, like beneficial nuclear mutations.
- Widespread fitness alignment in the legume–rhizobium symbiosis. There are no cheaters.
- Genetic polymorphism in Lactuca aculeata populations and occurrence of natural putative hybrids between L. aculeata and L. serriola. Not much diversity in Israel, surprisingly. But isozymes?
- Meta-Analysis of Susceptibility of Woody Plants to Loss of Genetic Diversity through Habitat Fragmentation. The standard story — that trees suffer less genetic erosion because they are long-lived — is apparently wrong, even for wind pollinated trees.
- Large-scale cereal processing before domestication during the tenth millennium cal BC in northern Syria. “This was a community dedicated to the systematic production of food from wild cereals.”
- Nazareno Strampelli, the ‘Prophet’ of the green revolution. Before Norman, there was Nazareno.
- The memory remains: application of historical DNA for scaling biodiversity loss. Historical collections of salmon scales reveal many connections between modern evolutionary significant units (ESUs) in the Columbia River and old ones; but also, intriguingly, some differences.
How not to debunk anti-GMO propaganda
Graham Brookes and Bruce Chassy wrote a detailed rebuttal of a paper by G.F. Botta et al. in the American Journal of Plant Science, which questioned the value of GMO soybeans in Argentina. On the basis of their analysis, Brookes and Chassy conclude that:
The major deficiencies identified in this paper lead us to question the thoroughness of the review process undertaken by the American Journal of Plant Sciences, as it is our professional assessment that this paper should not have been accepted for publication in any reputable peer review journal.
I cannot dispute that. I can, however, point out that in seeking to orchestrate an invincible attack, Brookes and Chassy are perhaps guilty of stressing a single, not very helpful view of the nature of diversity, which is also entirely unnecessary to discredit the Botta et al. paper.
The main thrust of their rebuttal is to challenge the statements surrounding the use of the weedkiller glyphosate, and as an outsider that convinced me that the original paper was indeed deeply flawed. The two experts then go on to address another claim in the original paper.
‘Up until not recently agrarian diversity had always been increasing. However, in industrialized countries, plant and animal genetic engineers, trading houses and governments themselves combined forces to supply new varieties and uniform breeds that would replace the tremendous heterogeneity already existing’. ((Let’s leave aside entirely the very strange wording of this paragraph from Botta et al., and indeed the very title of their paper, despite the obvious clues they contain as to the worth of the journal they chose as the happy recipient of their research.))
That’s easy enough to skewer, and Brookes and Chassy do so well enough.
From the very beginning of agriculture biodiversity of crops has, in fact, been continually contracting as farmers and breeders selected the most desirable crops (see for example, L.T. Evans. Feeding the 10 Billion, Cambridge University Press).
Sloppy to confuse crops and varieties, but hardly criminal. Unfortunately, from my perspective, instead of leaving it at that, they go on to help readers to do something that they say Botta et al. have not done, viz.
to comprehend the nature of breeding modern crop varieties. While a single or limited number of varieties may be grown in one region at a particular time, this does not mean biodiversity is being lost. Quite the contrary, since modern varieties have complex combinations of parents this results in the incorporation of numerous diverse traits from many ancestors.
Yes. And, what is your point?
This argument deliberately or ignorantly confuses the differences among genetic diversity in a pedigree, genetic diversity within a population, and genetic diversity among populations planted at a given time in a given place. Brookes and Chassy then go on to show how crop failures that the rest of us associate with “reductions in ‘genetic variety’” are in fact no such thing. Forget their view of the Irish potato famine. Consider instead their account of Southern Corn Leaf blight, which halved maize yields in the US in 1970. Here is how Brooks and Chassy describe the cause of the epidemic:
In 1970, all US corn had, what is known as N cytoplasm (a designation of the genotype of the mitochondria). Around this time a second cytoplasm called T was introduced which facilitated male sterility for hybrid seed production. Ironically, it was the new cytoplasm that was susceptible to blight.
So far, so true. As a result of the widespread adoption of Texas cytoplasm to confer male sterility – because it makes the production of F1 hybrids easier and cheaper – almost all the maize planted in the US shared a single type of mitochondrial genome that rendered them all susceptible to Southern Corn Leaf blight. As far as that susceptibility is concerned, there was genetic uniformity in the crop, no genetic diversity at all. So how do Brookes and Chassy describe that?
So, in this case, it was an increase in diversity—not a decrease—that caused the problem.
How can they possibly say that?
Before the widespread adoption of Texas cytoplasm, there was a range of genetically-based susceptibilities among maize varieties. Afterwards, all varieties were susceptible. Because they all shared one set of genes.
Here is how a panel of the US National Academy of Sciences described what happened:
The corn crop fell victim to the epidemic because of a quirk in the technology that had redesigned the corn plants of America until, in one sense, they had become as alike as identical twins. Whatever made one plant susceptible made them all susceptible.
Uniformity is the key word–the plants were uniform in that special sense, and uniformity in a crop is an essential prerequisite to genetic vulnerability.
There are other aspects of the Brookes and Chassy rebuttal that I am unhappy with ((Ex-situ conservation is “much more effective at preserving biodiversity”. Why “farmers all over the world are willing to buy improved seeds”.)) but I’m sufficiently self aware not to pursue them here.
Instead, I’ll just conclude that genetic diversity in a pedigree is not the same as genetic diversity in a population, a species, or an ecosystem. Especially not as far as resilience is concerned.
Just the facts, ma’am
Friends will, I know, be wondering why on earth I’m bothering. Indeed, after a little digging, I wondered why Brookes and Chassy bothered too. The American Journal of Plant Sciences is published by Scientific Research Publishing, which has been described as a scam and which “borrowed” papers published elsewhere and called them its own. It may be peer-reviewed, in the strict sense, but it is also clearly a joke. So why bother debunking a joke? Equally, Academics Review, the site where Brookes and Chassy (who is one of the founders) published their debunk, seems to be withering on the vine. The debunk itself isn’t dated, although on 20 March David Tribe (another founder of the site) gave notice that Chassy and Barfoot have just put out a dissection of Botta et al. ((I’ve no idea who this Barfoot cove might be.)) Few of the pages at Tribe and Chassy’s site seem to have a date, and there hasn’t been any “news” since May 2010. It’s all a bit sad, because a repository of countervailing facts would be useful, especially if not sullied by internal errors.
Nibbles: Musa, Millennium Seed Bank, Cassava conference & blog
- The banana in the Pacific. Including those orange ones…
- Swapping seeds at Kew. A genebank reaches out.
- Gosh is that all today? Looks like it. You guys out there have anything?
- No, wait, here’s something else. Huge cassava conference coming up, with its biodiversity on the agenda. These guys will probably be there.
Nibbles: New drug, Bees, Blood oranges, Dahi, Melaku speaks, So does Rajiv.
- A drug company is almost ready to go with a pain reliever from the Peruvian rainforest, based on Acmella oleracea, “also known as toothache plant”. Clues, wherever you look.
- Why biodiverse beehives do better. It’s partly down to biodiverse bacteria.
- Producing blood oranges anywhere. I’ll enjoy my Sicilian ones more, now I know why only some are bloody.
- A hymn to the diversity of fermented milk products.
- Interview with Melaku Worede of Ethiopia; “we are still losing diversity at an alarming rate”.
- Rajiv Shah, administrator of USAID, explains what it is all about.
Brainfood: Beans, Potatoes, Lettuce, Agave, Gaming, Mangroves, Ancient millets, Ancient missions
- Mesoamerican origin of the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is revealed by sequence data. Revealed is kinda strong isn’t it? This from a bean expert of my acquaintance: “Yes, we knew that, as it seems to be the case of all species of the Phaseoli section. They could have done a bit better in including the 2 populations of Cordoba mountain, in order to see whether these belong to the first migration to the Andes, or the second one. Wild vulgaris from western Panama, or Venezuela, could have helped in this regard too. We have shown years ago that the complex genetic structure in Mexico and in Colombia is the result of these floristic migrations combined with gene flow events because beans cross among themselves.”
- The Enigma of Solanum maglia in the Origin of the Chilean Cultivated Potato, Solanum tuberosum Chilotanum Group. These are long-day adapted and therefore crucial to the history of the potato in Europe. But the various sorts of evidence looked at to investigate their relationship to the rare Chilean wild relative S. maglia just do not agree. Bummer.
- Wild and weedy Lactuca species, their distribution, ecogeography and ecobiology in USA and Canada. So Iowa is a wild lettuce hotspot. If you’re interested in the germplasm, it’ll be in the genebank of Palacký University in the Czech Republic.
- Sustainability of the traditional management of Agave genetic resources in the elaboration of mezcal and tequila spirits in western Mexico. Tequila industrial agriculture should learn from the traditional kind.
- Fate of the World: computer gaming for conservation. Worth a try. No, really.
- The Economic Value of Mangroves: A Meta-Analysis. You might think there would be a value in the abstract; you would be wrong.
- Early millet use in northern China. That would be Setaria italica and Panicum miliaceum, and new evidence from ancient starch grain on pottery and grinding stones found in archaeological sites has pushed back their cultivation in N China by 1000 and 2000 years respectively, to about 9500-7500 BC. The Archaeobotanist has more, as ever.
- Digitization and online availability of original collecting mission data to improve data quality and enhance the conservation and use of plant genetic resources. They’re there (and here; what’s up with that?) to consult and make use of if you want.
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