Category: Genetic diversity

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Getting enough vitamin A in Kenya

There’s an interesting juxtaposition of material in today’s Nation. Unfortunately, none of it is online so you’ll just have to take my word for it, unless you live in Kenya that is. On the one hand there’s an advertising feature announcing the launch of fortified fats and oils. The four-page spread says that “a team representing government, the standards setting body, testing agencies and the private sector brought Vitamin A-fortified oil to the supermarket shelves in only 130 days.” It includes statements by the Ministers of Health and of Trade & Industry, the Director of Medical Services, the Director of the Bureau of Standards, the Director of the Kenya Medical Research Institute and the Africa Regional Director of the Micronutrient Initiative. The mid-term review of the effort is on the Micronutrient Initiative website here.

Interestingly, the Ministry of Agriculture seems not to have been involved, but in a different part of the paper there’s an article about the widespread and rapid adoption of new, vitamin A-rich sweet potato varieties by communities in western Kenya as part of a project funded by Farm-Africa under the Community Mobilisation Against Desertification (CMAD) programme, in which that ministry did take part. A women’s group in Homa Bay has set up a bakery that uses sweet potato flower mixed with wheat to make bread, cakes and other products for local schools and hospitals.

So, two contrasting ways of trying to achieve the same thing: and end to hidden hunger. I wonder which approach will end up proving better value for money? Do we need both?

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Want to save diversity? Talk to a local

A report from the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science says that “many animals and plants threatened with extinction could be saved if scientists spent more time talking with the native people whose knowledge of local species is dying out as fast as their languages are being lost”. David Harrison, the scientist whose work is reported, says that the recent DNA-based discovery that a butterfly known to taxonomists as Astraptes fulgerator was in fact three different species (or, perhaps, 10 — did the locals know that?) could have been made much sooner if the scientists had talked to the Tzeltal-speaking people of Mexico, because Tzeltal has several descriptions of the butterflies based on the different kinds of caterpillar. The people distinguish the larvae because the caterpillars eat the peoples crops, whereas the butterflies are of no significance.

“It’s crucial for them to know which larva is eating which crop and at what time of year. Their survival literally depends on knowing that, whereas the adult butterfly has no impact on their crops,” Harrison said.

There must be other agriculturally-informed examples, but the opposite is also often true, creating a nightmare for scientists interested in genetic diversity. Farmers may use the same name for completely different populations of a crop. And they may use different names for genetically identical populations. What’s a poor researcher to do?
p.s (There are a bunch of other studies about names and identity; can I find them? Can I heck.)

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More tea, vicar?

You may remember an earlier – somewhat facetious – post on a possible threat to tea diversity in China. Now, from CropBiotech Update, there’s a summary of a far from facetious review paper on tea breeding in that country. Turns out that the China National Germplasm Tea Repositories can count on some 3000 tea germplasm accessions, and that over 200 improved varieties have been released. Some quite advanced biotechnological approaches are being used to speed up breeding. One of the things the researchers are looking at is developing cultivars with low or no caffeine, using RNAi. Personally, I think caffeine-free tea and coffee, like alcohol-free beer, are a bit like a one-legged man at a butt-kicking contest: useless. But the technology is cool.

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Very diverse barley discovered … and already under threat?

SciDev.net reports on a paper in Theoretical and Applied Genetics that identifies the world’s most genetically diverse barley varieties. SciDev.net and other press reports focus on the high diversity of the barleys, found growing in farmers’ fields around the captial city of Asmara in Eritrea, as a source of potentially valuable material for improving tropical varieties worldwide. They point out, too, that the populations are threatened by urban development and that Eritrea has no genebank in which to protect them. But does Eritrea really need its own genebank, or have they more pressing priorities? A researcher from ICARDA, which has a perfectly serviceable genebank, was on the team. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture guarantees free access to the material if stored there. Eritrea was one of the first signatories of the Treaty. What’s the problem?

More interesting, perhaps, is a part of the paper that the reports I read neglected to mention. The molecular analysis indicates that the Horn of Africa may be where barley was first domesticated. That honour usually goes to the Fertile Crescent, with the Horn a “secondary centre of diversity”. But Eritrean and Ethiopian barley may actually have been domesticated independently.