- How to look for stuff in Chile’s genebank.
- How colonial Americans gardened. And later built stuff out of produce.
- How Romans ate.
- How Armenians are (still) making wine.
- How to figure out where your coffee comes from.
- How the Pacific is saving its crop diversity.
- How organic agriculture delivers benefits, and how it does not.
- How GMOs deliver benefits, and how they do not. By the same person as the above.
Food and plant resources roundup
A couple of meta-resources today. First, a handy database of botanical illustrations, with thanks to Mark Nesbitt of Kew for the tip:
Plantillustrations.org is a non-commercial website and will not trouble you with irritating advertisements or ask you for donations. It provides a searchable index so that you can easily find plant illustrations by using accepted or synonymous botanical names. The database is copyrighted but most illustrations can be used freely under the Creative Commons License. Please visit the website of the original contributors for further details. You can find them on the left side of the HD illustration page. If you want to use photographs please ask Max Antheunisse or contact Jan Koeman.
Second, a list of food museums from the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery:
Symposiasts and followers of our Facebook page responded enthusiastically when I asked about their favourite food museums. There is, in fact, a searchable online listing of some 1400 such museums compiled by Shirley Cherkasky and friends at http://foodhistorynews.com/directory.html.
But for the fun of it, here is a rather more selective listing of the ones that our symposiasts and Facebook followers came up with. Feel free to suggest others through your comments! My personal favourites are The Endangered Cake Museum and The Burnt Food Museum.
Yeah, I know. There goes your afternoon.
Following Brassica into Genebank Database Hell
Scientists at The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) have released the first web repository for Brassica (mustard plants) trait data to tackle reproducibility, user controlled data sharing and analysis worldwide. Scoring the versatile crop’s beneficial traits will assist Brassica breeders in improving their crop yields, increased nutritional benefits and reduce our carbon footprint through biofuel production.
Very worthy, of course. But also, alas, an opportunity missed. How so? Come with me to Genebank Database Hell.
Let’s start with a random germplasm line from the Brassica portal: DEU146_BRA_02028. That’s a weird but somewhat familiar name. People in the know will recognize DEU146 as the code for the German national genebank, IPK. But the organization is given in the portal as CGN, the Dutch national genebank. What’s going on? Stay with me, don’t panic. The portal does provide the following metadata for the material in question:
Provenance: Brassica.xls file downloaded from http://documents.plant.wur.nl/cgn/pgr/brasedb/, March 3rd 2010
Comments: Line name concatenated from resource collection code and genetic resource collection “accession” number; associated data availabel from European Brassica Database of Genetic Resource Collections
Entered by: graham.king@bbsrc.ac.uk
Entry date: 2010-03-03
One’s first instinct of course is to look for the BRA_02028 bit of the name among the DEU146 material in Genesys, but that would be too easy. You have to strip out the assorted underscores, and indeed the leading zero, and that gets you to the right accession, which happens to be from Ethiopia. Breathe.
You could also Google the European Brassica Database of Genetic Resource Collections, as per the metadata, which is hosted by CGN, hence the reference to that organization in the portal. If you search for BRA 2028 you get to the same thing as in Genesys, and eventually to the original record at IPK.
So, to recap: a British guy entered into the Brassica portal some data hosted (as part of a European project) by the Dutch genebank, pertaining to an accession in the German genebank collected in Ethiopia and originally conserved in the old West German national genebank. The actual URL quoted in the metadata returns a 404 error.
Look, I’ve said it before, and no doubt I’ll say it again. It’s great that gene-jockeys like the ones at TGAC build their own databases with all kinds of fancy genotypic and phenotypic data for breeders and other researchers to use. It’s really great, I mean it. It’s what’s going to get the stuff in genebanks used, and we all want that. But please, please, make sure that those breeders and researchers don’t have to go through what I’ve just described to actually get their hands on the seeds. Because I’m pretty sure they won’t. Go through it, I mean. They have better things to do.
Mapping out your garden
There’s a website called Plants Map which lets you manage and share information about the precise location and characteristics of the plants you grow, including photos, and even print out nice labels, complete with QR codes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmonl8lszIwThe target audience seems to be gardens (including botanical gardens), nurseries, and the like. But it could be field genebanks, couldn’t it? Or even seed banks, with a little tweaking, and location on the shelf taking the place of latitude and longitude. Something for Genesys to learn from?
CWR front and centre
To coincide with the State of the World’s Plants Symposium, which starts today, Kew have just dropped a monumental report of the same name, complete with fancy website. Nice to see crop wild relatives get a decent amount of space (p. 21) in the section on useful plants. Oh, and the report and symposium come along with some good funding news for Kew.
Speaking of funding for crop wild relatives:
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) today announced a five-year partnership to provide funding to broaden the scope of The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. This will significantly increase knowledge on the extinction risk of more than 28,000 species, including many that are key food sources for a significant portion of the global population.
…
IUCN experts have chosen to focus much of the newly funded research on the populations of plants and fish that billions of people depend on as a vital source of food. These will include species of wild rice and wheat that are crucial to food security because they are the source of genetic material used to increase the yield, fertility and resistance to disease of staple crops produced by farmers across the world.
Don’t see any of this happening even a few years back. Do you?
Prof Kathy Willis @kewgardens @KewScience putting #plants on the map #SOTWP pic.twitter.com/g45pTxZPfk
— David Cope (@DrDrCope) May 11, 2016