- Molecular Markers for Genetic Diversity Studies in African Leafy Vegetables. Not surprisingly, only 3% of 33 studies since 1998 are on Cleome, more than half on cowpea. And a quarter used RAPDs. Orphan crops, anyone? These one don’t even get a table summarizing and comparing findings across species.
- Conservation priorities of Iberoamerican pig breeds and their ancestors based on microsatellite information. Depending on how you crunch the genetic numbers, Iberoamerican pig breeds could conceivably best be looked after by conserving their ancestral Iberian pig breeds. But it’s not just about the genetics, is it?
- Native fruit tree genetic resources in Japan. Only a Castanea was domesticated in pre-modern times, and they’re all endangered in post-modern times.
- Perceptual selection and the unconscious selection of ‘volunteer’ seedlings in clonally propagated crops: an example with African cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) using ethnobotany and population genetics. It’s seedlings that look most like existing varieties that farmers try to keep.
- Changes in sunflower breeding over the last fifty years. From yield under optimal conditions to disease resistance, from oil quantity to quality. But international collaboration still needed.
- Angolan vegetable crops have unique genotypes of potential value for future breeding programmes. Unique material documented, and hopefully made available for use.
- Maize Germplasm Conservation in Southern California’s Urban Gardens: Introduced Diversity Beyond ex situ and in situ Management. Migrants bring along their crops.
- An assessment of the conservation status of Mesoamerican crop species and their wild relatives in light of climate change. Priority areas for on farm and in situ conservation don’t by and large coincide with protected areas.
- A Proposal Regarding Best Practices for Validating the Identity of Genetic Stocks and the Effects of Genetic Variants. Just do it.
Fancy maths meets haystack
One of the authors, Michael Mackay, tells us about a new book that is sure to set pulses racing.
A question anyone involved in crop improvement — breeders, pre-breeders, genebank managers, genetic resources experts of all hues — has invariably asked is: where can I find some new genetic variation to overcome this nasty new problem that’s hammering productivity in my region? We all know there is an enormous reservoir of plant genetic resources held in ex situ or in situ around the globe. To use a cliché that’s been much used but never bettered in this context: it’s all too often like looking for a needle in a haystack. Sure, molecular biology is increasingly predicting, and occasionally even delivering, a more rapid pathway to identifying and using those elusive new genes or alleles. But are we making the best possible use of the information that’s out there already?
Enter Applied Mathematics and Omics to Assess Crop Genetic Resources for Climate Change Adaptive Traits. This book, just published by CRC Press, applies the latest statistical techniques to explore plant genetic resources data of all different kinds. The aim is to help researchers create manageable, trait-specific, sub-sets of germplasm. These should end up being best-bet candidates for evaluation and further research. Think of core collections, but skewed towards — enriched for — particular traits, rather than efficiently covering diversity overall. Think of a smaller haystack with a much better chance of containing that needle.
While the book proposes a general conceptual mathematical framework for exploring how different data can be used to estimate the likelihood of specific variation existing within a given accession, there is a particular focus on climate change. It includes discussion of how genetic resources can be used to mitigate and adapt to climate change, and how different plant traits are likely to become more important as the climate changes.
So, as genebanks accumulate information on their germplasm — making the haystack ever bigger — and plant breeders come up with ever better ways to use that elusive needle, this book identifies an opportunity to bring these two communities together in the cause of adaptation to climate change. The maths needed to facilitate a more effective ‘mining’ of novel genes and alleles from the world’s genebanks is certainly fancy. But this books puts it within the reach of anyone with a computer. Or a pitchfork.
Nibbles: Strampelli, Gender, State of World’s Plants, Wild peanuts, Istambul gardens, ICRAF & CIFOR DG chat, Biofortification, Cowpea genome, SSEx Q&A, Rice resilience, Cacao & coffee microbiome, Mapping crops, BBC Discovery, EU seed law
- “È curioso che il grano Cappelli, ora diventato un simbolo della “pasta da gourmet”, fosse una volta il comune grano della pasta di tutti i giorni, e che venga da alcuni considerato “autoctono” quando in realtà è una varietà tunisina.” Curious indeed.
- A woman’s crop? Not as straightforward as it may sound.
- State of the World’s Plants symposium, 11-12 May.
- Above will no doubt consider crop wild relatives such as the peanut’s.
- More on the urban vegetable gardens of Istanbul.
- Tree DGs in the garden getting coffee. On International Forest Day.
- The “Bernie Sanders” vision of biofortification.
- Cowpea to get a genome.
- Q&A with John Torgrimson of Seed Savers Exchange.
- The resilience of rice: “You never find a crop that can span this latitude and altitude.” Really? Wheat?
- Cacao and coffee have a microbial terroir.
- Crop mixes are geographically stable.
- Prof. Kathy Willis of Kew on Feeding the World, including using crop wild relatives. IRRI Kew genebanks featured.
- Denmark interprets EU law to allow seed saving.
The long and winding road to crop wild relative conservation priorities
Those who follow these things will probably have noticed a certain frisson in the press over a paper in Nature Plants on setting conservation priorities for crop wild relatives. Lead authors are Nora Castañeda and Colin Khoury of CIAT, both of whom have featured here before. Good to see Nora celebrating the occasion on Twitter. She really deserves that beer.
Our paper on conservation of CropWildRelatives is published #cwrgap cheers @AgroBioDiverse https://t.co/W7B0VgG0mg pic.twitter.com/OXS25FvrnI
— Nora Castañeda (@np_castaneda) March 21, 2016
Well, I think it’s a beer.
Anyway, I won’t go into the details of the findings here. As I say, it’s all over the news (well, relatively speaking), and you can always explore the results for yourself on the project’s website. But I did want to strike a historical note.
This whole thing started when a small group of us decided it would be kinda fun to apply fancy spatial analysis methods to data from herbaria and genebanks on the distribution of wild Phaseolus species in the Americas. Just to see if it could be done. And whether the results would make any sense.
Well, it could, and they sort of did. And many years, a major international project, two PhDs and a lot of blood, sweat and tears later, we have a global analysis across dozens of genepools and hundreds of species. It was totally worth it, but there should be easier, faster and less expensive ways to get this kind of thing done.
Mapping crop words online
Do you remember the post a few weeks ago about Jack Grieve and his method for mapping words used in tweets? He helped us to investigate to what extent it could be used to map crops in the USA.
The answer was: it depends. Anyway, now you can try it for yourself. Go crazy.