Category: Genetic diversity

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Nutrition and the naming of plants

Just in time for the big meeting on Biodiversity and Sustainable Diets, opening today at FAO in Rome and part organized by our pal Jess, comes shocking news:

Of 502 sample plants, only 36 followed best practice for plant identification, and 37 followed best practice for plant nomenclature. Overall, 27% of sample plants were listed with names that are not in current use, or are incorrectly spelt, or both. Only 159 sample plants would have been found from a database search of citations and abstracts. Considering the need for food composition data from wild and locally cultivated food species, and the cost of analysis, researchers must identify, name and publish species correctly. Drawing on the fields of ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology, comprehensive recommendations are given for best practice.

Mark Nesbitt and his colleagues analyzed the quality of botanical information in published papers about the nutritional value of plant foods. ((Nesbitt, M., McBurney, R., Broin, M., & Beentje, H. (2010). Linking biodiversity, food and nutrition: The importance of plant identification and nomenclature Journal of Food Composition and Analysis, 23 (6), 486-498 DOI: 10.1016/j.jfca.2009.03.001)) What they discovered was that in many cases, if you relied on the botanical names as given in the papers, you would be hard put to identify the species concerned accurately enough to use automated searches of databases. And that could be a real problem as researchers seek to build a case for the value of lesser-known wild and cultivated species in building sustainable and nutritious diets.

There are, of course, recommendations to remedy the problem: “best practice”. Whether they’ll be widely adopted is anyone’s guess.

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Old and new Nordic spring wheats side by side

Pictures being worth a thousand words, and all that, here are pictures — moving pictures, no less — of some Swedish wheats that were planted out for regeneration and characterization earlier in 2010.

Thanks Dag for the link. How hard would it be to make links to this sort of thing available from all-knowing databases, I wonder? Dag thanks the film-maker, Axel Diederichsen, for putting the names of the varieties into his description of the film, and suggests adding the accession numbers. If everyone did that, some kind of spider could surely crawl the web looking for, and linking to, any and all mentions of the number, and linking to them. With human curation, of course.

Is that crazy?

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The State of the World’s PGRFA

I’ve spent much of the day wondering what on Earth can usefully be said about the 2nd report on the State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, published today by FAO. Not a lot, I suspect, without wading through the entire tome. So what does FAO think is important?

Jacques Diouf, Director General of FAO, had this to say:

Increasing the sustainable use of plant diversity could be the main key for addressing risks to genetic resources for agriculture.

Sorry Jacques, old chum, but I just can’t quite seem to parse that one.

The report “does not attempt to quantify biodiversity loss,” for which we must be grateful, although the press release reminds us of FAO’s estimate that “75 percent of crop diversity was lost between 1900 and 2000” and “predicts that as much as 22 percent of the wild relatives of important food crops of peanut, potato and beans will disappear by 2055 because of a changing climate.” Right.

Genebank numbers and accessions are up, so those entries in the long-term memory have to be scrubbed and updated. 1750 genebanks, 130 have more than 100,000 accessions, 7.4 million samples, 6.6 million in national genebanks, 45 percent in just 7 countries, down from 12 in 1996. But hey, that’s probably rationalisation at work, because “in 2008, the ultimate back-up of global crop diversity, the Svalbald [sic] Global Seed Vault, opened in Norway”.

Carping aside, the report is a useful compendium of country reports (each downloadable as a separate PDF) and specially-commissioned thematic background studies (ditto) all served from an easy-to-use website (although the Picture Gallery doesn’t work for me yet).

Definitely an A for effort, then.

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Nibbles: Apple Diversity, Sorghum, Ugandan organics, Cows, CABI, Giant pumpkin, Nutrigenomics, SOTW2