My good friend Cesar Azurdia has alerted me to the publication of the book Guatemala y su Biodiversidad. Chapter 9 focuses on agricultural biodiversity. There’s a lot of great stuff on homegardens, crop wild relatives, effects of climate change etc., all subjects very dear to our heart here.
I’ve never met an axolotl, But Harvard has one in a bottle
The axolotl is a salamander that was an important part of Aztec legend and diet but is now barely hanging on in the tourist canals of Lake Xochimilco in Mexico City. It’s on the IUCN Red List of threatened species, as a result of the draining of the lake on which the city was built, increasing pollution and the introduction of tilapia.
Local fisherman Roberto Altamira, 32, recalls when he was a boy, and the axolotl was still part of the local diet. “I used to love axolotl tamales,” he says, rubbing his stomach and laughing.
Scientists are proposing captive breeding and re-introduction, and “a pilot sanctuary is expected to open in the next three to six months in the waters around Island of the Dolls, so-called because the owner hangs dolls he finds in the canals to ward off evil spirits.”
I hope it works out. I’d like to taste one of those tamales some day. And since we’re on the subject of edible Mexican agrobiodiversity, another example came to my mind today when I read that the new First Family-elect needs an hypoallergenic pooch. They have lots of options beyond the somewhat boring goldendoodle. My personal choice would be the Xoloitzcuintli. And not because its meat is said to have healing properties. Or not primarily for that reason.
Rethinking the Resurrection Initiative
EurekAlert! had a piece about the Resurrection Initiative a couple of days back:
While an international seed bank in a Norwegian island has been gathering news about its agricultural collection, a group of U.S. scientists has just published an article outlining a different kind of seed bank, one that proposes the gathering of wild species — at intervals in the future — effectively capturing evolution in action.
I guess the idea is worthy enough, but the article is unfortunately full of misconceptions about genebanks. I’ll just highlight the most egregious.
“In contrast to existing seed banks, which exist primarily for conservation, this collection would be for research that would allow a greater understanding of evolution,” said Franks.
Really? That will come as a surprise to all the breeders and other users of genebank materials.
“Typically, seed banks are focused on the preservation of agricultural species or other plant species of strong economic interest, say, forest species, forest trees,” said Mazer. This is to make sure that scientists can maintain a genetically diverse seed pool in the event of some kind of ecological calamity that requires the replenishing of seeds from a certain part of the world or from certain species.
Well, while it is true that most seedbanks concentrate on crops, they do also maintain samples of wild relatives of crops, though probably not nearly enough, and of wild forages. And there are major genebanks — such as the Millennium Genebank at Kew — which conserve only wild species. But it’s the second part of the quote that is perhaps most surprising. Although genebank materials have indeed been used in restoration, surely their most common use is as sources of genes for breeding programmes.
“The approach that we would use is not simply to collect seeds over various time intervals and to archive them, but in the future to raise them in a common environment comparing seeds that were collected in 2010, 2030, and 2050, for example,” said Mazer. “If we found, for example, that the plants that come from seeds that were collected 50 years from now flower much earlier than those that were collected today, we could logically infer that natural selection over 50 years had favored plants, that is genotypes that flowered earlier and earlier, relative to those that delayed flowering.”
That makes it sound as if genebankers never do any characterization and evaluation of their holdings. Raising seeds in a common environment is in fact a standard genebank operation.
Don’t get me wrong, repeated collecting of the same population is an interesting thing to do. We don’t have enough hard data on genetic change. It has in fact been done even for agricultural species, though not on the systematic basis proposed here. I’ve done it myself, revisiting southern Algerian oases from whence wheat had been collected 10 years before, for example. But to suggest that a different kind of genebank is needed to accomodate such an initiative is stretching it. Let’s make sure we are making effective use of the genebanks we already have. We’re having enough difficulty keeping those going on a sustainable basis.
“The maize equivalent of the grey wolf”
Not content with bringing you Our Man Hijmans’ dynamite written dispatches from Harlan II, today, The Spoken Word. David Williams, coordinator of the CGIAR’s System-wide Genetic Resources Programme, appeared on Insight, a daily in-depth interview programme hosted by radio station KXJZ in Sacramento, California. David talked about domestication, genetic modification, the history of collecting, the importance of crop wild relatives and much else besides.
Listen to it here. (About 12 minutes.)
Tasteful breeding
A couple of days ago the Evil Fruit Lord complained — a little bit — about an article in a Ugandan newspaper which extolled the virtues of traditional crops and varieties over new-fangled hybrids. While not doubting the many attractive qualities of landraces and heirloom varieties, he quite rightly pointed out that there’s nothing to stop modern varieties and hybrids tasting just as good:
I get really sick of the tendency to talk about plant breeding as a process which makes crops into finicky, crappy tasting garbage in exchange for yield. You absolutely can create varieties which taste as good (or better) than traditional varieties, produce more, and resist pests. In fact, plant breeding is the only way to get to that.
Now there’s an article by Arthur Allen in Smithsonian magazine which basically says — not very surprisingly, I suppose — that both those things have happened in the tomato:
Flavor … has not been a goal of most breeding programs. While importing traits like disease resistance, smaller locules, firmness and thicker fruit into the tomato genome, breeders undoubtedly removed genes influencing taste. In the past, many leading tomato breeders were indifferent to this fact. Today, things are different. Many farmers, responding to consumer demand, are delving into the tomato’s preindustrial past to find the flavors of yesteryear.
Allen has a good word to say for the wild relatives:
The architect of the modern commercial tomato was Charles Rick, a University of California geneticist. In the early 1940s, Rick, studying the tomato’s 12 chromosomes, made it a model for plant genetics. He also reached back into the fruit’s past, making more than a dozen bioprospecting trips to Latin America to recover living wild relatives. There is scarcely a commercially produced tomato that didn’t benefit from Rick’s discoveries. The gene that makes such tomatoes easily fall off the vine, for instance, came from Solanum cheesmaniae, a species that Rick brought back from the Galapagos Islands. Resistances to worms, wilts and viruses were also found in Rick’s menagerie of wild tomatoes.
And he also plugs genebanks:
…we can take comfort in the tomato’s continuing, explosive diversity: the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a library of 5,000 seed varieties, and heirloom and hybrid seed producers promote thousands more varieties in their catalogs.
Not quite sure where he got that number, as the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetic Resources Center seems to have about 3,500 accessions, but anyway.