“Genetic endemism” is northern Eurasian cattle.
Arctic seed monkeys in publicity storm
Some people have all the fun. Reporter Louise Roug, of the Los Angeles Times, has clearly had a blast writing a major feature on the Global Crop Diversity Trust’s “doomsday vault” on Svalbard, above the Arctic Circle. She has it all: glaciers and frozen wilderness; airlocks, steel-reinforced doors and a video-monitoring system; more aggressive farming methods, environmental degradation and changing weather patterns; quotes from senior science coordinators with the Trust.
She also, this being modern journalism, has contrary opinions. To provide balance. So the director of one NGO is reported as saying that the Arctic seed vault “tends to divert attention, energy and money away from what we consider as much more urgent and sustainable efforts to save biodiversity on the farm”.
Responding to salinity
Aussies breed salt-tolerant wheat.
Bottlegourd to the rescue
Zucchini yellow mosaic virus (ZYMV) does not, alas, restrict itself to zucchini, or even courgettes. It attacks most cucurbits, including cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, squash, bottlegourds and watermelons. One of those, however, the bottlegourd Lagenaria siceraria may also hold the antidote to ZYMV. Scientists at the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA grew seeds of 190 different accessions from a USDA genebank and inoculated the seedlings with virus.
To their surprise, 36 accessions of the 190 screened—33 from India alone—were completely resistant to ZYMV infection, and another 64 accessions were partially resistant. They also found that ZYMV resistance is heritable in crosses between different bottlegourd accessions, enabling the development of bottlegourd varieties with enhanced virus resistance.
Breeding resistance from Lagenaria into other cucurbits may be difficult, although if they can isolate the gene(s) responsible other options become possible. And even they may not be needed. Growers can graft watermelons, for example, onto bottlegourd rootstocks and benefit from the resistance that way.
p.s. I shouldn’t get snitty, of course, but Wikipedia’s entry on bottlegourd in China is bizarre in the extreme. I’m not going to wonder what a “remedy for health” is, though it sounds to me a lot like a disease. I am going to wonder why there is absolutely no mention of the presence absolutely everywhere of a jillion small bottlegourds as good luck charms. The Buddha used one to carry “life’s essentials”.
Linking archaeology and agrobiodiversity
It was probably a silly thing to say. A couple of days ago I briefly mentioned the models that researchers have built, based on present-day genetic data on Europeans, to understand the rate and pattern of human movement into the continent during the Neolithic. And I made the throw-away comment that I wasn’t aware of similar models for crops. I sort of instantly regretted it, and last night did some googling.
At first I thought perhaps I was right after all. I found a recent (2006) paper whose abstract says:
Thus far, no attempts have been made to track the movement of the founder genetic stocks of the first crop plants from their core area based on the genetic structure of living plants.
Further on, though, the authors say they’ve done just that for wheat. And I also found reference to a “Domestication of Europe” project which sought
to determine the extent to which phylogeographical analysis of modern landraces of barley and wheat, combined with examination of ancient DNA in preserved specimens, can reveal genetic information pertaining to the spread and establishment of cereal cultivation from its points of origin in Southwest Asia into and through Europe.
I think the project must have run from 2003-2006. The Glyn Daniel Laboratory for Archaeogenetics at Cambridge was one of the labs involved, and some of the work, and other related research projects, is described on its website.
So there are people out there trying to link up the archaeology and human genetics of agricultural spread in Europe with the genetics of crops and livestock. Is it too early for a Grand Synthesis?