- Astonishing stories surrounding Major Cook’s Bean.
- Mo’ beans. But not 7 miles worth.
- Mojo. Will work for fruit. Don’t miss the history.
- Palm oil project in Uganda judged “on innuendo”. And why not?
Restoration is germplasm use too
It is well known that plant populations do best when they grow close to where they originally came from. A myriad reciprocal transplant experiments going back decades attests to the power of local adaptation. But how close is close? The question is of very real practical importance if you’re trying to restore a habitat. By definition, the local population is gone. What is the maximum distance you should be willing to go to collect material to re-establish it?
Three hundred kilometers is the answer given in a paper just out in Ecological Applications. ((Travis, S., & Grace, J. (2010). Predicting performance for ecological restoration: a case study using Spartina alterniflora Ecological Applications, 20 (1), 192-204 DOI: 10.1890/08-1443.1)) There’s also a discussion over at Conservation Maven. The authors worked on the salt marsh grass Spartina alterniflora, which is commonly used in ecological restoration of wetlands in North America. They collected germplasm at 23 sites from Texas to Maine, genotyped them using neutral markers, and then grew them all in a “common garden” experiment in Louisiana, where they measured in various ways how well each population did. The control was a population just across a canal from the experimental site.
It turned out that clone diameter, number of stems and number of inflorescences at the experimental site, as well as genetic distance, were all significantly affected by measures of the geographic distance between the source and the experimental site. For populations up to about 300km away along the coast, performance in the common garden was similar to the control. Go further, and the source populations do not do as well where they are planted.
The authors make quite specific recommendations for restoration. Use material from at least three populations within 300km of the restoration site, and 100km if you want material that is not only maximally locally adapted but also not significantly genetically different from the original population at the restoration site.
Now, I don’t know how widely applicable these recommendations might be. I don’t know the restoration literature at all. A cursory look revealed a fairly well-developed theoretical framework, the “restoration gene pool concept.” Which has been used to develop a decision support tool.
As I say, I don’t know much about restoration. So I don’t know to what extent this sort of thing has been applied to crop wild relatives. To me, “use” of crop wild relative germplasm means use in breeding. But that is clearly very narrow thinking, and I should be ashamed of myself.
Measuring diversity in Tibetan walnuts
You collect leaves from 220 walnut trees of two morphologically very distinct species (Juglans regia and J. sigillata) from two unrelated groups of families of villagers in each of six different villages in Tibet. You get the gene-jockeys to do their microsatellite stuff on the leaves. You calculate the contribution of species, of the kin relationship of the growers and of village to genetic diversity. You expect the biggest genetic differences to be between species.
You are wrong.
Yes, the “species,” which look totally different, are in fact indistinguishable genetically. But there were significant differences among villages, and smaller but still significant differences between unrelated families of farmers within villages. So, you might be particularly interested in certain traits, for improvement say (and so are the farmers: walnut landraces in this part of Tibet are often named after fruit phenotypes). But — in this case — morphology is not a great guide to the totality of the underlying genetic diversity. So you can’t use it alone for conservation.
Which is also the conclusion researchers in Benin arrived at in their study of another tree, akee (Blighia sapida), also just out. A conservation and use (domestication, in this case) strategy “should target not only the morphotypes recognized by local populations but should also integrate the population genetics information.”
Does this amount to a general rule?
Agricultural biodiversity conservation and use in the spotlight at IITA
The latest edition of IITA’s R4D Review has various articles on agrobiodiversity issues, including a roundup of the activities of the centre’s genebank and an interview with its manager, Dr Dominique Dumet.
Nibbles: Truffles, Botanicals, Cell phones, Child nutrition, Chocolate, Georgia
- Truffle genome (about to be) sequenced. Pigs unimpressed.
- Lunar influence on botanicals. Fascinating.
- Cell phones for germplasm documentation and taxonomic identification.
- Video of John Hoddinott of IFPRI discussing award-winning Lancet article on the effects of child nutrition on adult income.
- Climate-ready cacao, anyone?
- GEF agrobiodiversity project in Georgia a success story. See why.