- Ancient DNA from an Early Neolithic Iberian population supports a pioneer colonization by first farmers. People, not just crops, moved.
- Genetic consequences of using seed mixtures in restoration: A case study of a wetland plant Lychnis flos-cuculi. After a few generations of use for seed production, it’s best to abandon ex situ stocks and go back to the wild populations.
- Creative Commons licenses and the non-commercial condition: Implications for the re-use of biodiversity information. It’s complicated. I wonder if the multi-headed hounds who guard the gates to GBDBH are aware of this. Here’s a blog post.
- Is diversification history of maize influencing selection of soil bacteria by roots? Kinda.
- A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2012. Perennial cereals make the cut.
- How pristine are tropical forests? An ecological perspective on the pre-Columbian human footprint in Amazonia and implications for contemporary conservation. It doesn’t matter.
- Genetic diversity of carrot (Daucus carota L.) cultivars revealed by analysis of SSR loci. Western and Asian groups, the latter more diverse, because of landraces. But 88 accessions does seem a bit few. And no wilds.
- Mapping of earthworm distribution for the British Isles and Eire highlights the under-recording of an ecologically important group. 28 species! But many gaps. No diversity map. Will send them DIVA-GIS for Christmas.
Brainfood: OSP adoption, Milk quality, Passport data quality, Historical collections, Sweet potato domestication, African veggies, Baobab diversity and domestication, Cassava diversity, Strawberry breeding, Barley GWA, Pest symbionts, Maize diversity and climate change
- A large-scale intervention to introduce orange sweet potato in rural Mozambique increases vitamin A intakes among children and women. Just 1 year of training worked just as well as a higher intensity intervention (3 years) in increasing OSP and vitamin A intake by younger children, older children and women, and decreasing prevalence of inadequate vitamin A intakes. OSP represented about half of all sweet potatoes consumed so I guess there was not complete replacement of local varieties.
- Composition of milk from minor dairy animals and buffalo breeds: a biodiversity perspective. There are significant interbreed and inter-species differences. Dromedary milk is closest to cow milk, mare and donkey milk maybe the healthiest, but moose milk is the one I’d like to try.
- Quality indicators for passport data in ex situ genebanks. That would be the genebanks in Eurisco. Verdict: not bad, but could do better. Most variation in quality is among institutes.
- Exploring the population genetics of genebank and historical landrace varieties. Old samples of dead seeds of 4 crops in Swedish museum jars more genetically variable than genebank accessions, but it’s not the genebank’s fault. And at least their seeds are still alive. Also no genetic correspondence between geographically matched museum and genebank samples.
- Combining chloroplast and nuclear microsatellites to investigate origin and dispersal of New World sweet potato landraces. Two areas of domestication, probably from a single wild progenitor species: lowland NW South America and lowland Central America/Caribbean. Genetic differences between these 2 genepools not accompanied by morphological differences, but then again nobody’s looked properly, and the current descriptors are useless anyway.
- The significance of African vegetables in ensuring food security for South Africa’s rural poor. Their huge potential is being thwarted by evil extensionists. Ok, but don’t we need to move beyond that?
- Comparative study on baobab fruit morphological variation between western and south-eastern Africa: opportunities for domestication. Hang on a minute, aren’t there a million factsheets about all this?
- Marriage exchanges, seed exchanges, and the dynamics of manioc diversity. Kinship structures determine cassava diversity patterns in Gabon. Matrilineal societies have more diversity.
- Interspecific hybridization of diploids and octoploids in strawberry. You get pentaploid and tetraploid plants.
- Genome wide association analyses for drought tolerance related traits in barley (Hordeum vulgare L.). Ok, deep breath. Over 200 accessions, both wild and cultivated, from 30 countries, so quite variable, but also structured. There were some QTLs that differed between dry and wet sites, but they didn’t explain much phenotypic variation, and they couldn’t be related to previous work. So GWA not much use, probably because of population structure. But couldn’t that have been predicted? And isn’t it possible to do something about structure in the analysis?
- Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Mostly proteobacteria. So my question is, could somehow attacking the symbionts form the basis of a pest management strategy?
- Projecting the effects of climate change on the distribution of maize races and their wild relatives in Mexico. Many races and wild relatives are predicted to shift in geographic distribution. Unless of course agronomy intervenes. Teocinte taxa should be collected.
What OSP do and do not do
Amid all the brouhaha surrounding the publication of the paper “A large-scale intervention to introduce orange sweet potato in rural Mozambique increases vitamin A intakes among children and women” in the British Journal of Nutrition, it is worth reminding ourselves what the study did and did not find.
Adoption of 6 orange-fleshed sweet potato (OSP) varieties and their displacement of white and yellow varieties in the diet of the people in the study area led to significant, important change in vitamin A intake in vulnerable groups:
…the net change in mean vitamin A intakes of the intervention groups relative to the control represented increases by 63, 169 and 42% among reference children, young children and women, respectively. These net increases were equivalent to approximately 74, 118 and 55% of the corresponding EAR for vitamin A(26) for the same groups, representing a substantial increase in dietary vitamin A.
The study also found that “estimated prevalences of inadequate vitamin A intakes by these groups commensurately decreased.” All of which is of course great. But the authors cannot be said to have found any change in the vitamin A status of people. That’s because this wasn’t measured. As the authors themselves admit:
…it is not possible to predict the impact of these increases in vitamin A intake on change in vitamin A status.
But they were not guessing wildly, of course:
One of the main reasons for not including vitamin A status indicators in the present study was that a similar but smaller-scale study in the same area serving as a precursor to the present one had already demonstrated a positive impact on children’s serum retinol concentrations following increased intake of vitamin A from OSP and other vitamin A sources.
So the argument is not entirely tied up, though it does seem pretty solid. Evaluation of nutritional and health impacts is hard.
Just a final word about diversity. Six OSP varieties were introduced and adopted, and as we’ve seen seem likely to be having a significant health impact. But are they also having an impact on the diversity of the local production systems? The authors suggest that they might: “OSP is an acceptable, local food source of vitamin A that can easily replace currently grown white or yellow sweet potato varieties.” And in fact it does seem they did:
OSP accounted for 47–60% of all sweet potatoes consumed in the … [study] groups across ages, indicating a moderately high degree of substitution for other varieties. In the control groups, 20–24% of all sweet potatoes consumed were OSP.
Again, paralleling the vitamin A story, this is replacement in the diet, not necessarily substitution in the fields. But it is an alarm bell nonetheless to a conservationist. Genesys shows a worrying situation for sweet potato conservation in Africa, though that’s because it does not yet pick up some very significant national and regional collections, including Mozambique’s own. Hopefully that will change. But as we’ve mentioned here before, it is important for such projects to survey the local diversity before they introduce their own new, no doubt “better” diversity, and make sure the local stuff is placed in genebanks, if it is not there already. I don’t know if that was done in this case. I hope so. Those “currently grown white or yellow sweet potato varieties” may not be much good for vitamin A intake this year in Mozambique, but they may well be very good for something else, next year, somewhere else. And maybe even in the very farms in which they have been replaced.
Nibbles: Bangladeshi rice, Ugandan seeds, Indian policy
- The Daily Star of Bangladesh waxes lyrical about old rice varieties, and asks “Who knows how many of these homegrown varieties will soon dwindle into being sheer memory?” We know the answer to that one: 75%
- Professor Sir Gorden Conway hymns Josephine Okot, woman seed entrepreneur.
- Part 2 of a look at whether India’s city-centred policy is justifiable. Not on diversity grounds.
Sago going
Seriorl Anzu has a great video of sago preparation in the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. Which reminded me about this summary from PestNet of the dire situation of sago in Bouganville, where “all the sago palms have died in the highlands.” There are no collections of Metroxylon sagu known to WIEWS.