- Freeing legumes in Africa.
- Hemp used to be much more free in Italy.
- The unfree history of soybeans in the US.
- Taxonomists are not free to rename acacias at will.
Brainfood: INCREASE, Bean geneflow, Potato geneflow, Rhodes Grass diversity, Tritordeum, Ivory Coast PGRFA access, Thai rice diversity, Local food, Indian rice breeding, Genetic diversity metric, Grapevine rootstocks
- Intelligent Characterization of Lentil Genetic Resources: Evolutionary History, Genetic Diversity of Germplasm, and the Need for Well-Represented Collections. Basically a set of protocols for producing, documenting and maintaining single-seed descended (SSD) pure lines. For beans too. Courtesy of the INCREASE project.
- Gene Flow in Phaseolus Beans and Its Role as a Plausible Driver of Ecological Fitness and Expansion of Cultigens. The diversity in the wild-weedy-crop complexes should be studied and conserved.
- Natural and Cultural Processes Influencing Gene Flow Among Wild (atoq papa), Weedy (araq papa and k’ipa papa), and Crop Potatoes in the Andean Region of Southern Peru. Indigenous communities seem to be doing just that for potatoes in the Andes.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of a Rhodes Grass (Chloris gayana) Collection. From 104 accessions in the ILRI genebank to a core collection of 21 in 2 genetic clusters. No word on SSD.
- Tritordeum: Creating a New Crop Species—The Successful Use of Plant Genetic Resources. That would be Hordeum chilense x durum wheat. Quite the wild-weedy complex.
- Systems of Genetic Resources Exchange in Côte D’Ivoire and its Evolution: Case Study of Food Crops Such as Yam, Cassava, Rice and Plantain. Lots of material has come into the country from CGIAR centres, except for yams.
- Estimation of the Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Thailand’s Rice Landraces Using SNP Markers. Two geographic subgroups within indica. No word on influx of material from CGIAR.
- The sustainability of “local” food: a review for policy-makers. Local food does not necessarily mean environmentally, socially or economically sustainable food. I guess that may go for genetic resources too (see above)?
- Rice breeding in India: eight decades of journey towards enhancing the genetic gain for yield, nutritional quality, and commodity value. QED.
- Global Commitments to Conserving and Monitoring Genetic Diversity Are Now Necessary and Feasible. Phew.
- Grapevine rootstocks affect growth-related scion phenotypes. It’s not just about the genetic diversity. But still.
The making of GapAnalysis.R
A big thank you to Colin Khoury, Julian Ramirez, Chrystian Sosa, and Dan Carver for this guest post, reminding us of the history of conservation gap analysis work at CIAT and other CGIAR centres during the past decade and more.
Maps have helped people find their way for at least 2500 years, so it’s no surprise that geographic methods have been part of the portfolio of tools used to try to understand patterns and distributions of crop diversity, and, more recently, crop genetic erosion, ever since these topics began to garner the interest of scientists and conservationists. Innovations in digital mapping tools, made possible by developments in computer processing and the internet, have enabled continual leaps in the power and efficiency of such methods throughout the past few decades.
CGIAR embraced geographic information system (GIS) research tools about as soon as they were developed. At the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), the International Potato Center (CIP), the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI, now Bioversity International), and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), among others, scientists began to apply available GIS tools to genetic resources conservation, and then develop their own suite of methods, programs, and datasets, often in collaboration with national partners and academics (e.g. wild potatoes, peanuts, chile pepper, and peanut/potato/cowpea, as well as climate data). Some of these developments, such as FloraMap and DIVA-GIS (and more recently CAPFITOGEN, by other researchers), have been aimed at making these tools easier to use by those in genetic resources community without extensive GIS experience: an important effort toward greater accessibility, even if it has met with mixed success.
By the 2000s, crop wild relatives were gaining attention as important genetic resources for crop breeding, and would soon be specifically targeted for conservation both by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD’s Aichi Target 13), and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG Target 2.5). It was increasingly important, therefore, that conservation research tools were applied to these useful wild plants, and fortunate that the groundwork for GIS applications had already been laid by a decade or so of research. Through the second phase of a cross-CGIAR initiative called the Global Public Goods Project 2 (GPG2), run from 2007-2010, the distributions of the wild relatives of ten CGIAR mandate crops were mapped, with priorities for further collecting for ex situ conservation identified.
Another career in crop diversity
Dr Mike Jackson is retired now, after a long and very impactful career in plant genetic resources conservation. But he writes about that career, and a lot more besides, on his blog. And now there’s also a nice conversation with him on the Plant Breeding Stories podcast, focusing on his work on potato and rice.
Nibbles: Yeast, Asian veggies, Ancient malt, AYB
- Researchers manipulate biodiversity to reduce the amount of alcohol in wine. For some reason.
- Promoting the cultivation of traditional Asian vegetables in the US. That’s more like it.
- Reproducing ancient malting. Now you’re talking.
- Giving African yam bean a helping hand. Faith in researchers duly restored.