So I was idly reflecting on the recent paper by Magurran et al. in Trends in Ecology & Evolution on long-term datasets for biodiversity monitoring which I Nibbled earlier, then I ran across another paper, and that really got me thinking. When we talk about protected areas, we usually mean national parks and reserves and the like (or at least that’s what I usually mean), but I wonder whether that misses something. I’m thinking here of long-term exclusion experiments, ((Including “accidental” experiments, perhaps.)) such as the one in Kenya that second paper talked about, for example. There must be other such things around the world: long-term experimental areas, rather than legally recognized reserves, but still (somewhat) protected, and with time series of vegetation and floristic data to boot. Is this something that has been looked at, either regionally or on a global scale, in the context of crop wild relatives conservation? Will investigate.
Nibbles: Plant breeding book, Ug99, NGS, Monitoring, Genetic diversity and productivity, Adaptive evolution, Amaranthus, Nabhan, Herbarium databases, Pepper, Shade coffee and conservation, Apples, Pathogen diversity, Phytophthora
- Book on history of plant breeding reviewed.
- Rust never sleeps.
- Ask not what next generation sequencing can do for you.
- Long-term datasets in biodiversity research. Nothing about genetic diversity though. Bummer.
- And genetic diversity is important, is it? Yep, it increases productivity, at least in Arabidopsis.
- No evidence of adaptive evolution in plants. What? Surely some mistake? I’m serious. And don’t call me Shirley.
- The latest from Worldwatch on African leafy veggies. Again, some links would have been nice.
- And Worldwatch also interviews Gary Nabhan on Vavilov.
- You can browse Tropicos specimens in Google Earth.
- Using pepper to protect stored rice.
- More evidence of the goodness of shade coffee.
- The diversity of Bosnian apples.
- Mammal plus bird species richness explains 72% of country-to-country variation in the number of human pathogens. Diversity begets diversity. But which way does the causality go?
- Phytophthora infestans in Estonia: “…higher proportion of metalaxyl resistant isolates from large conventional farms than from small conventional farms or from organic farms.” Metalaxyl is a fungicide.
Nibbles: Protected area management, Yam domestication, Ottoman cooking, Measuring rice drought tolerance, Proteomics, Lupinus, Areca, Jethobudho, Nutrition megaprogramme, Soil bacteria
- Concentrating management practices on conserving a particular plant species may have bad consequences for other bits of biodiversity. Lessons for crops wild relatives?
- Benin’s farmers ennoble wild yams.
- A Lebanese lunch is an educational experience. Right.
- Paddyomics video. Nothing to do with the Irish. It’s about how IRRI is automating, er, everything about its phenotyping.
- Tamarind’s environmental niche is, in fact, er, niches?
- Different wheat genomes generate distinct protein profiles.
- Phylogenetic relationships of a new Mediterranean lupin.
- Betel nut chewing endangers coral. Kinda. Traditional and all that, but an unpleasant habit nonetheless.
- Our friend Bhuwon and others tell the story of the participatory improvement and formal release of Jethobudho rice landrace in Nepal.
- CGIAR elicits comment on the Agriculture for Improved Nutrition and Health megaprogramme. Until August 1.
- Bacterial diversity boosts maize yields.
Nibbles: Cassava virus, Peru’s Potato Park, Marula, Taimen, Meetings, Cornish fruits and veg
- New cassava varieties saving Zanzibar. Good to hear, though as ever one worries about what’s happened to the local landraces.
- Alder’s photos of the Potato Park. Do follow her travels around South America in search of agrobiodiversity.
- Namibia looks for other marula products.
- Saving the taimen in Mongolia. That would be a fish. A mighty fish.
- Interesting Indian symposia: wild fruits; “lifestyle floriculture.” Oh, to have more information.
- “Gariguette strawberries are an old variety and are non-licensed.” Crazy, eh?
Looking for leimotifs in the early history of wheat and rice
There are two papers out just now which review in detail archaeobotanical and genetic data to elucidate the early history of crops. Dorian Fuller and numerous co-authors do it for Asian rice (Oryza sativa) ((Fuller, D., Sato, Y., Castillo, C., Qin, L., Weisskopf, A., Kingwell-Banham, E., Song, J., Ahn, S., & Etten, J. (2010). Consilience of genetics and archaeobotany in the entangled history of rice Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 2 (2), 115-131 DOI: 10.1007/s12520-010-0035-y)), Hakan Özkan and others do it for emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccoides). ((Özkan, H., Willcox, G., Graner, A., Salamini, F., & Kilian, B. (2010). Geographic distribution and domestication of wild emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccoides) Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution DOI: 10.1007/s10722-010-9581-5)) And Fuller actually also comments on the emmer paper on his blog. ((Which is called The Archaeobotanist and is well worth following. In fact, I cannot resist linking to something else that Fuller has pointed to recently, a fascinating Science profile of Dr Dolores Piperno, who has pretty much single-handedly “revolutionized views of early agriculture in the Americas” through her use of microscopic remains of phytoliths and starch grains.))
In such situations, my first instinct is to look for commonalities, rather than get lost in the specifics. ((Is this evidence of some personality disorder? No, don’t tell me.)) Certainly, the occasional difficulty of reconciling archaeobotanical and genetic data comes up in both reviews. Actually there’s a third paper out which looks at that too, suggesting that “genetic and archaeological studies represent complementary perspectives on domestication, each highlighting a different facet of this complex problem.” ((Gross, B., & Olsen, K. (2010). Genetic perspectives on crop domestication Trends in Plant Science DOI: 10.1016/j.tplants.2010.05.008)) Complexity is a word that recurs a lot, in fact. Here’s Fuller: “Asian rices have had a complex history.” And here’s Özkan: “The spread of domestic emmer would have been extremely complex…”
But the really interesting question to me is whether there are similarities within the complexity. As Tolstoy might have asked, are the early histories of different crops complex each after their own fashion? Fuller summarizes the emmer story as one of “multiple starts of cultivation, gradual domestication, but the possible predominance of one domesticated line at the end of the process,” and there certainly are some echoes of that in rice. But I want to focus on one little series of events or processes that occurs in both rice and emmer, in each case with its peculiarities, but nevertheless comparable.
Cultivated emmer (Triticum dicoccon) was developed from its wild progenitor (T. dicoccoides) in south-eastern Turkey. ((Perhaps in one of that country’s Important Plant Areas?)) It then spread to the north-east, where it came into contact with wild Aegilops tauschii. Somewhere in the corridor between Armenia and the Caspian Sea, hybridization between the two gave rise to hexaploid bread wheat from tetraploid emmer. Well, something kind of similar also happened in rice. Fuller’s paper has a nice diagram summarizing the relationship between japonica and indica rices. Simplifying wildly, japonica arose in China from wild Oryza rufipogon. It was then taken to India, where it came into contact with cultivated proto-indica rices and also the wild species from which that was derived (O. nirvana). Hybridization and back-crossing eventually led to fully indica varieties. A crop develops in one place, then moves somewhere else, where it interacts with something, leading to the development of a somewhat different crop.
Now, I’m not sure whether the differences in this process, in particular the fact that polyploidy was involved in the emmer case but not rice, are more important than the similarities. But I wonder if the domestication and spread of crops can perhaps be broken down into a series of similar tropes, or maybe leitmotifs, I’m not sure what one would call them. At the very least it might help people like me make sense of — and try to remember, and keep straight — the complexities.