Category: Information

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“Super broccoli” from field to fork

The story begins in the Mediterranean in the early 1980s when Professor Richard Mithen, currently at IFR, was on a field trip to collect rare plants as part of his PhD at the University of East Anglia. “We collected wild brassicas in southern Italy and Sicily, and that material was sent into various seed banks in Italy, Sweden and Spain,” says Mithen. “I was able to go on this expedition due to Professor Harold Woolhouse, the then Director of the John Innes Institute, who provided me with a small grant to cover some of my travel costs.”

If you want to read about this collecting trip, you can, thanks to the Collecting Missions Repository: look for CN375. Here’s the material the boys collected which ended up in Spain, according to an “advanced” Eurisco search, as mapped by Genesys:

Where does the story end, you ask? Well, with Beneforté ‘super broccoli’. And a fascinating story it is too. Read for yourself.

LATER: Prof. Mithen informs me the wild species involved was Brassica villosa.

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Rounding up wild Guatemalan cacao accessions

…are there really no wild Guatemalan cacao accessions conserved in genebanks around the world?

I asked the question, so I better have a go at answering it, I suppose.

WIEWS shows no wild cacao from Guatemala, and actually not all that much cacao in Guatemala of any kind. GRIN returns 10 Theobroma accessions from Guatemala, but none of them are described as wild. The International Cocoa Germplasm Database (ICGD) returns 6 accessions from 4 localities. Here they are shown as crosses.

I got them into Google Earth via DIVA-GIS. The other icons show the distribution of herbarium specimens of wild T. cacao (C) and T. bicolor (B) and the predicted range of the former, according to the Guatemalan CWR atlas I blogged about yesterday. But you can’t tell from the data in ICGD whether the accessions represented by crosses are wild or not. Don’t worry though, there’s a reference given for all the accessions, so all is not lost: Rivera De Leon, S. (1986). Informe general sobre el proyecto de recoleccion de cacao Criollo en Guatemala. Unpublished report AGPG:IBPGR (FAO Rome)/86/156. Estacion de Fomento Los Brillantes, Guatemala.

It is an IBPGR report, so it should be available in the Bioversity’s Collecting Missions Files Repository. Which it is, although finding it was non-trivial. I’m not sure if that last link is going to last long, so look for collecting mission CN234. The problem is, I can see no way of attaching the description of the material given in the report to one or another of the accessions in ICGD. So although it does look from the report as though some of the material collected in 1986 may have been wild, I can’t tell you which if any of those crosses in the map above could legitimately be added to the Atlas of Guatemalan Crop Wild Relatives.

So the answer to the question I started out with is: I don’t know. I suppose it’ll take an expert in the crop to sort it out. You come up against this again and again in Genebank Database Hell. You can get so far, but to get any further you need human intervention.

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Some faba beans, without the nice Chianti

ResearchBlogging.orgIf you’re a faba bean breeder interested in cold tolerance you will have come across a paper recently in GRACE the title of which will have set your pulse racing: Screening and selection of faba beans (Vicia faba L.) for cold tolerance and comparison to wild relatives. 1 And if you had skimmed ahead to the conclusion you would have found it difficult to contain your excitement.

In conclusion, some faba bean accessions were selected for cold tolerance and desirable agronomic characteristics. ACV-42, ACV-84 and ACV-88 were selected as highly cold tolerant. These sources of cold tolerance could be used to improve cold tolerance level in faba bean breeding programs.

You would then have gone back and read the paper thoroughly to find more information on these previous accessions, and in particular on where to get hold of them. But you would have been disappointed, and you might very well have moved dejectedly onto the next paper in your Google alert.

Fortunately I am made of sterner stuff. So, thanks to an email to the authors, I can now tell you that

ACV-42 = TR 31590 at the Aegean Agricultural Research Institute, Izmir, Turkey
ACV-84 = IG 14048 at ICARDA
ACV-88 = IG 72247 also at ICARDA

And, thanks to Genesys, I can add that IG 14048 is a Polish landrace called Debek and IG 72247 is from Canada and has at some point had the number “73 Rm 70”, though I can find no reference to this in GRIN-Canada. Neither Eurisco nor Genesys has the Turkish genebank’s faba bean data, and their website was down when I tried it today, so I can’t tell you anything about TR 31590, I’m afraid.

You’re welcome.

And here’s a bit of a bonus for you. The paper also drops the fact that

The best known freezing tolerant genotype is a French genotype ‘Cote d’Or’ which can survive –22ºC if previously hardened…

Well, being a faba bean breeder interested in cold tolerance you probably already know that, and have it, but in case you’ve run out or something, Genesys/Eurisco says you can get it in a couple of different genebanks, including CGN in the Netherlands. 2

Now, to feed back that evaluation information on ACV 42, 84 and 88 — and indeed all the other hundred-odd accessions evaluated in the paper — to the genebanks from whence they came, to make life that little bit easier for the next faba bean breeder interested in cold tolerance breeder…

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Nibbles: In situ CWR project gong, IRRI genebank kudos, Seed Savers interview, Hairloom spuds TV, Rice and salinity, Korean wild seeds

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The strange silence of the CGIAR on CBSD

Good to see CABI reacting to a slew of recent press reports on Cassava Brown Streak Disease in East Africa with a blog post summarizing what they and others have been doing about that very worrying problem lately. Interesting also that the best they can do as far as linking to what the CGIAR is doing is an IITA story from 2010, though they do nick IITA’s photo. I couldn’t find any reaction from the CGIAR on the CBSD story, which is surprising because the FAO press release which seems to have sparked the whole thing off does mention new IITA varieties that could help solve the problem. The best the CG seems to have been able to produce is a tweet and a blog post referring to a rapid multiplication technique which quoted an IITA video from 2009. Relevant, yes, but neither the tweet nor the post refers to the FAO story. Why is the CG not getting involved in this discussion more actively? What am I missing?