- Herbaria viva: proto-genebanks of Mendel’s contemporaries in Moravia. The early 19th century living plant collections of Moravia (the world Mendel grew up in) were a kind of proto-genebank, systematically maintaining and circulating crop diversity decades before genetics had a name.
- Saving evolutionary time: Conflicting planetary temporalities in the genetic diversity debate, 1967–1980. Looking back 50 years, and 50 years after the Moravian proto-genebanks, a historian of science traces how Otto Frankel and Erna Bennett, sounding the alarm on genetic erosion in the 1960s-70s, articulated two competing visions of time and responsibility for safeguarding crop diversity, one rooted in development, the other in collective stewardship of evolution itself.
- Utilization and conservation of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture in China: a systematic review of genebanks and farmers’ seed systems. From history to present-day infrastructure. In China, genebanks and farmers’ seed systems have developed together, but gaps between formal and informal conservation remain. Otto and Erna unavailable for comment, alas.
- The effect of crop genetic diversity to food security among smallholder farmers in the global south and the role of community seed banks: a narrative literature review. Here’s the evidence on how community seed banks shape food security for smallholders, but could do more. That’s the informal system at work for you, Erna would say.
- How community seed banks contribute to climate-resilient seed systems: evidence from Ethiopia, Malawi, and Nepal. Speaking of which, a companion study looks at how community seed banks function in practice, finding they do bolster local seed security and climate adaptation, but with real limits: patchy variety availability, uneven quantities, and occasional genetic erosion of their own.
- Varietal development and rice yield growth in India: assessing IRRI’s germplasm contribution. A new assessment of the contribution of IRRI germplasm to Indian rice breeding comes in at around 11% of annual rice yield growth from 1966 to 2021. That’s the formal system at work for you, Otto would say.
- Improving low-pH and high-aluminum field tolerance in alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.). Also on the breeding front, screens of genebank collections and their derivatives for field-level tolerance to difficult soils bear fruit. Or rather, leaves.
- FAIRness at all costs? Practical limitations in applying the FAIR principles to plant genetic resources data. And finally, a reality check for the data side of all this. Applying the FAIR principles to plant genetic resources data isn’t as straightforward as the mandate suggests, with a number of practical friction points standing between the ideal and actual implementation.
Nibbles: Mango breeding, Cambodian peppers, Cold genes, Geechee cowpea, Navajo genebank
- Blue mangoes.
- Kampot pepper.
- Antarctic flowering plant.
- Sapelo Island red pea.
- Navajo seed data.
Nibbles: Amaranth webinar, FARA on fonio, Maslin, Gaza genebank, Nepal seeds, Golden Triangle tea
- New webinar series from the American Society of Plant Biologists will explore how underutilized (or is it opportunity) crops like amaranth can contribute to nutrition, food security and rural livelihoods.
- FARA highlights the tiny West African grain fonio as another crop with potential to improve nutrition, strengthen food systems and create new opportunities for farmers and value chains.
- Taiwanese tea has travelled an unlikely route into northern Thailand. It too was an opportunity crop at one time.
- Ethiopian farmers may have been practising regenerative agriculture for millennia, mixing wheat, barley and other grains in the same field. The Rockefeller Foundation is on it.
- Efforts to restore the Al Qarara Seed Bank in Gaza are offering a small but significant form of agricultural recovery.
- In Nepal, indigenous seeds are losing ground to hybrids, but seed advocates are fighting back.
Conserving the tangle of grapevines
I think we may have already pointed to Conservation gap analysis for wild grapevines (Vitis L.) of the Americas, the latest in a series of papers by our friend Colin Khoury and a rotating assortment of colleagues on the conservation status of the crop wild relatives of the Americas, genepool by genepool. The authors compiled occurrence records for 38 wild American grapevine taxa, and used fancy GIS to infer the overall distribution and environmental niche of each. They then assessed the degree of representation of each taxon in genebanks and protected areas, and hence any remaining conservation gaps. Here’s the headline finding:
We categorize 25 of 38 of the taxa as urgent priority and 10 as high priority for improving ex situ conservation representation. Three taxa are assessed as urgent and 29 as high priority for enhancing in situ conservation. Further action, with emphasis on conservation gap hotspots, is needed to more comprehensively conserve wild Vitis native to the Americas.
Which is pretty clear.
Or is it?
What if “taxa” are perhaps not always the best units of conservation to use in assessing conservation efforts?
That may in fact be one of the implications of a paper that came out just a few weeks after that of Colin and friends: The dynamics of introgression and parallel adaptation across North American Vitis species.
These authors show that introgression and hybridization are pervasive and evolutionarily important across North American Vitis, based on genomic analysis of 639 accessions representing 48 species. About 14% of the average genome shows evidence of introgression, particularly associated with areas where species come into contact. Some taxa usually regarded as hybrid species are in fact better understood as ever-changing hybrid swarms, rather than distinct evolutionary lineages. Most importantly, the authors find that introgressed genetic variants have repeatedly contributed to adaptation in different species. The paper therefore portrays Vitis diversity as a reticulate network — or tangle — of species, populations and gene flow, rather than a set of discrete species.
This has important implications for conservation: hybrid zones and admixed populations may be really significant reservoirs of adaptive diversity. The framework of the first paper might potentially underestimate the conservation importance of regions where these occur, if they contain substantial genetic variation but aren’t well represented by the taxonomic units used in the gap analysis. For example, it might happen that two neighbouring species are reasonably well represented ex situ, but not from the specific regions where they hybridize and introgression occurs.
This suggests a useful next, synthetic step: take the geographic gaps from the first paper and overlay them with the evidence for introgression and gene flow networks from the second. The resulting map could identify not just under-collected species, but under-collected (or under-conserved in situ) evolutionary processes and genetic mixtures. That could be valuable for designing the next Vitis collecting mission.
Brainfood: Mung bean pan-genome, Sunflower resistance, Olive adaptation, Allergic peanuts, Weird coffees, Chinese tea, Measuring selection
- Graph-based pan-genome reveals structural variations associated with agronomic traits in mung bean. Pan-genome captures extensive structural variation missed by a single reference genome, providing new targets for mung bean improvement.
- Wild genes to the rescue: high-throughput genomics reveals the wild source of broomrape resistance in sunflower. Combining high-throughput root phenotyping with genomics identifies wild introgressions underlying broomrape resistance in sunflower and exposes valuable adaptive variation for breeding.
- Genomic insights into the local adaptation of spontaneous olive trees in the Mediterranean Basin highlight the need for conservation planning in the face of global change. Genomics of wild West Mediterranean olive trees reveals patterns of local adaptation across temperature and rainfall gradients that it will be important to conserve as climates change.
- Genetic regulation of major immunogenic protein accumulation in peanut seeds. Genomics provides targets for breeding peanuts with reduced allergenicity.
- Genomic elucidation of hybridization between Liberica and excelsa coffee and its implications for coffee crop development. Genomics confirms that Liberica and excelsa coffee readily hybridize and produce fertile, genetically diverse offspring with intermediate agronomic traits, a possible source of diversity to broaden coffee’s climate resilience.
- Simple sequence repeat (SSR) marker-based genetic diversity and population structure of large-leaf tea germplasm across four major tea-producing regions of Yunnan, China. Genomics of Yunnan’s large-leaf tea germplasm finds substantial genetic diversity but remarkably little regional differentiation, showing that seed propagation, natural crossing and human movement have maintained genetic connectivity across tea-growing regions.
- Measuring maternal line selection driven by differential survival in ex situ collections for plant conservation. A new method distinguishes random mortality from selection among maternal lines in ex situ collections, offering conservationists a way to detect whether plant deaths are systematically eroding the genetic variation they are trying to preserve. And no genomics involved.