- The Czech national genetic resources programme in a nice brochure.
- Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue, by Patrick Mulvany. Another nice brochure. Not entirely clear why it’s not included in the Journal of Peasant Studies special edition on the relevant conference.
- Forests can have Big Data too. Yes, it’s Global Forest Watch. And more from WRI, but it’s really all over the intertubes. No sign of the brochure. Yet.
- “So when I eat this [corn] I eat with all the energy of my history.” No brochures needed.
- Making agroforestry and agriculture in general attractive to yutes. Would a brochure help?
Nibbles: CGIAR priorities, Drought tolerant rice, Agroecology bibliography, Amaranthus seed production video, Ethiopian genebank, Yemeni genebank
- UN Special Rapporteur on food thinks “questions of the 60s are not the questions of today.” Does he think the CGIAR is answering the questions of the 60s? One suspects so, but surely there are points of agreement, e.g. nutrition, food systems, natural resources management…
- Farmers would be willing to pay quite a premium for drought tolerant (DT) rice hybrids, but for DT varieties not so much. That’s an opportunity for public-private partnerships. Or is that a 60s answer to a 60s question?
- Mr de Schutter probably knows all about this bibliography of agroecology in action. Which all seems so much more 60s than hybrid rice somehow.
- How 60s is it to want to produce decent amaranthus seed? It’s totally unfair, but I can’t resist linking to this now.
- Ethiopian genebank, set up in response to the genetic erosion of the 60s, gets nice, long writeup in The Guardian by way of introduction to a bare-bones couple of final paragraphs on some G8 poverty reduction plan. Nice video though.
- There was no Facebook in the 60s for genebanks to strut their stuff on.
CGN18108 it is
Simon Foster very kindly took the trouble to post a comment setting the record straight on the source of that blight gene:
Apologies, a previous tweet from ourselves erroneously confirmed the accession as CGN18000. It is in fact CGN18108 which is still listed in the database as Solanum okadae (was subsequently found to be S. venturii in DNA fingerprinting studies).
The origin of Rpi-vnt1 is detailed in the original research paper describing the cloning and characterisation of the gene and which is cited in the Roy. Soc. paper published yesterday. All acknowledgement of sources was published in that paper.
Foster SJ, Park T-H, Pel M, Brigneti G, Sliwka J, Jagger L, van der Vossen E, Jones JDG. 2009 Rpi- vnt1.1, a Tm-2(2) homolog from Solanum venturii, confers resistance to potato late blight. MPMI 22, 589 – 600. (doi:10.1094/MPMI-22-5-0589)
Here’s the relevant bit of that paper:
Accessions of S. venturii and S. okadae were obtained from the Centre for Genetics Resources in Wageningen, the Netherlands (CGN) (Table 1). The S. venturii accessions were originally listed as S. okadae in the CGN database but have recently been reclassified based on work using amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers to study the validity of species labels in Solanum section Petota (Jacobs 2008; Jacobs et al. 2008).
So my apologies to Dr Foster. There is indeed a very full and proper acknowledgement of the source of the gene in the earlier paper. However, I do still think that it would not really have taken much effort to also include an acknowledgement in the later paper. The confusion over which accession was actually used that I fell into, admittedly without taking the trouble of following the references, is evidence of why it’s important to do so.
Now to suggest to CGN that they may want to change the species name of CGN18108 in their database…
LATER: Just realized we started talking about all this quite a while ago.
Calling users of lettuce and potato genetic resources
An interesting announcement from our friends at CGN.
In the field of PGR documentation, we have seen, over the last decades, dramatic improvements: from card box files only mentioning the name of the variety and the location in the seed-storage, to internet accessible databases, sometimes with possibilities to order PGR on-line including click-wrap SMTA. However, the access to PGR information was always ‘supply driven’ saying: this is what we have, choose!
Here at CGN we have also been thinking about this, and decided that we might try to turn the situation towards a ‘demand driven’ PGR information access. Based on our experience interacting with users of our genebank, we have identified their first priorities where it concerns PGR: access to material and access to information, and on that basis experimented with creating web sites that could accommodate questions such as ‘where can I find a blue potato’, ‘where can I get material without having to sign a SMTA’, or ‘what has been done regarding the search for Bremia resistance in lettuce’. Some of such sites already exist, we wanted to find out if a genebank or the PGR conservation community would also be able.
We are proud to release two ‘PGR Crop Portals’ one aimed at potential users of lettuce germplasm, the other aimed at potential users of potato germplasm. These sites are not the same as the target audiences are neither, but, as you can see if you visit the sites, both ask frequently for feedback from the users, to add information, to share experiences.
This approach fits in a philosophy, where the data sources (genebanks) do the data collection and curation, whereas anyone can create an interface to the data (and thus the material) in these combined sources serving a specific target group. This target can be ‘lettuce breeders’ but also ‘anyone interested in crop wild relatives in the Balkan’, ‘the malting barley industry’ or ‘Dutch hobby gardeners interested in old vegetable varieties’. This approach requires (1) proper access to the PGR data, possibly via EURISCO or GeneSys, and (2) creators of interfaces who know their target audience very well and are willing to establish a communication link with this audience.
Please have a look at the site, and let us know what you think!
Finally, I would like to thank Rob van Treuren (lettuce), Roel Hoekstra (potato) and Frank Menting (both), for all their efforts to get the initiative to this stage, and express my hope that the user community will help to take it further.
A most welcome initiative, I think, finally moving beyond databases. Hard to fault the theory, let’s all see how the practice pans out. Leave comments here, or send them to Theo van Hintum at CGN.
Nibbles: New potatoes, Wild species, Native maize, Conservation course, Indigenous fishery, Yield trends
- Wild relative rescues potatoes. Which wild relative? Well for that you’ll have to read the paper. The FAQ on that. Or if you want an alternative. More the better, I guess. And just to remember what makes it all possible: diversity in fields and genebanks.
- Wild species not just useful to food security as sources of genes, of course. And more.
- Indigenous peoples save corn.
- Maybe some of them would be interested in this MSc at Bangor.
- Indigenous peoples can catch — and save? — fish after all.
- So is there stagnation in yield increases or what? Lobell reviews book that says maybe not.