Category: Genetic diversity

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Rice diversity measured and photographed

I did a quick nibble a few days ago about the OryzaSNP project, in which “[a]n international team of investigators used microarray-based resequencing to look for SNPs in 100 million bases of non-repetitive DNA in the genomes of 20 different rice varieties and landraces.”

They’ve come up with 159,879 single nucleotide polymorphisms, a “gold-standard set of curated polymorphisms” for rice.

As for the 20 varieties used…

“[t]hese varieties, the OryzaSNPset collection, are genetically diverse and actively used in international breeding programs because of their wide range of agronomic attributes,” the authors explained.

But what do they look like? Well, I just found this photograph of their seeds on IRRI’s Flickr page. A nice idea.

rice

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Nibbles: Camel, Maya forestry, Ancient barley, Cattle diversity, Poisons, Agroforestry Congress, Lactase persistence

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More than a nibble, less than a meal

A rapid round-up of some things that caught my eye.

A paper in Crop Science explores the Spanish national genebank’s collection of beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) in search of diversity. They find it, plus evidence of two New World genepools and some intermediate forms.

Banana farmers in The Philippines have reported good results from a programme on Enhancing Smallholder Banana Production. There are many components to the programme — which has boosted exports to valuable markets in Japan and Korea. Among them, the use of clean planting material produced by tissue culture, a focus on appropriate varieties, and careful management of fertilizer regimes. Incomes are said to have gone up 25%.

Cary Fowler is described by The Guardian as “one of the driving forces behind an international seed bank on the Arctic island of Svalbard”. And more besides, we would add. Anyway, he told a TedGlobal audience in Oxford, England, about the threat to agrobiodiversity.

His namesake apple, the Fowler apple, is still cultivated. Pulling out a book from 1904 of apples grown in the state of New York, the Fowler apple is described as a beautiful fruit, but it is also noted that “it fails to develop in size and quality and is on a whole unsatisfactory.”