- Avenues to meet food security. The role of agronomy on solving complexity in food production and resource use. Wait, what, it’s not all about the breeding?
- Population studies of native grass-endophyte symbioses provide clues for the roles of host jumps and hybridization in driving their evolution. Wait, what, we have to conserve these things too now?
- Morphological diversity in breadfruit (Artocarpus, Moraceae): insights into domestication, conservation, and cultivar identification. Cool, we now have a multi-access Lucid key to help us recognize varieties.
- Geographical variation of foxtail millet, Setaria italica (L.) P. Beauv. based on rDNA PCR–RFLP. Geographic differentiation, centre in East Asia, evidence of migration, yada yada.
- Within-genotype epigenetic variation enables broad niche width in a flower living yeast. Wait, what, now we have to document the epigenome too?
- Phylogeography of Asian wild rice, Oryza rufipogon: a genome-wide view. Fancy markers come through where lesser breeds caused confusion. Two groups, clinally arranged, with the China-Indochina group close to indica, neither close to japonica. So one, Chinese, domestication event, yada yada.
Agricultural biodiversity and population in Laos
Normally, I would elegantly link some trenchant comments on the Agrobiodiversity Initiative in the Lao PDR (TABI), whose website has recently been pointed out to us, 1 to the equally recent release of the AsiaPop dataset. But Lao PDR is, annoyingly, not (yet?) one of the countries for which AsiaPop has spatial population data. Which is a pity because TABI does have some interesting-looking maps on its study sites as well as a rather more forbidding, though no doubt extremely useful, online metadata platform.
Failing that, I’ll just leave you with TABI’s own description of TABI:
TABI is a long term commitment by the Lao Government and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) which seeks to conserve, enhance and manage the biological diversity found in farming landscapes in order to improve the livelihoods of upland farm families in northern Laos. During its first phase (2009-2012) TABI is geographically focusing on Luang Prabang and Xieng Khouang Provinces in the north of Laos.
Pretty special Indian Journal of Plant Genetic Resources online
The 25th anniversary special issue of the Indian Journal of Plant Genetic Resources (IJPGR) is available by permission from the Bioversity International website. Though this is subject to some restrictions on re-use, it is nevertheless pretty cool.
Sonalika searching
A blog post from CIMMYT presented a welcome opportunity to play around with a range of online information resources on wheat varieties, despite the fact that some of the links are broken.
So let’s say I want to find out about a particular variety. Sonalika, for example. I heard about it as being an important older Indian variety, and want to find out more: a pedigree, maybe some performance data, maybe even get some seed. First, I headed on over to the IWIS-Bib database, which “is a supplement to the International Wheat Information System. Each record in IWIS-Bib identifies a publication, and each publication describes a cultivar.” For Sonalika, that returns the citations of 11 references. Good start, though I do now have to get hold of the publications themselves. Maybe in the future I’ll be able to download a PDF, or there will be a link to Google Scholar, or whatever.
Let’s move on. I was not able to find a way of getting performance data for Sonalika from IWIS proper, though I was at the time pretty sure I’d be able to order seed of it from CIMMYT. But, having thought that, I then checked, and Sonalika does not feature in a Genesys search as being conserved at CIMMYT, although you get hits from various other genebanks, including USDA. And there’s plenty of characterization and evaluation data there. I may be doing CIMMYT a disservice here, though. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, but certainly there was no way of getting easily from a bibliographic hit on a particular variety to evaluation data on it. Which it would be nice to be able to do.
Moving on again, I then headed over to the Genetic Resources Information and Analytical System for Wheat and Triticale (GRIS), the main subject of the blog post I mentioned at the beginning. Entering Sonalika in the little search box gave me a whole lot of very cool stuff. Like a pedigree: II-53-388/ANDES//(SIB)PITIC-62/3/LERMA-ROJO-64. Which you might like to compare with the one on GRIN: II53-388/Andes//Pitic 62 sib/3/Lerma Rojo 64. Reassuringly similar. And accession numbers; which interestingly do not include CIMMYT. So it does look like I wouldn’t be able to get Sonalika from them after all. You also get summary evaluation data and even recommendations for use, which is very handy. And a pedigree diagram, which is, however, frustratingly impossible to export.
So, overall, a not uninteresting though ultimately somewhat disappointing experience, mainly because of the necessity of hopping between websites. But maybe those linkages will come now that a bunch of the people concerned have had a meeting, as described in the post that started all this. Fingers crossed.
Nibbles: Coconut origins, Microbe genebank, Stay-green barley, Sachs may suck, Cap in hand, Wheat information, IITA birthday, Cat art, Poppy biosynthesis, Correcting names
- Coconut origins, the quick version.
- Chile gets a bugbank.
- Stay-green barley genes located. In a genebank collection, natch. What now, a Stay-green Revolution?
- New Economist blog agnostic about Millennium Villages.
- Plant scientists call for $100 billion investment in, er, plant science.
- Wheat pedigrees online.
- IITA a youthful 45.
- Cats in Islam.
- Noscapine production in poppies is complex, but not so complex that boffins can’t figure it out.
- Want help in getting taxonomic names right? What you need is the Taxonomic Name Resolution Service. Does that mean we don’t need this any more?