Category: Information

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Bill Gates on genebanks and their databases

From Bill Gates’ annual letter on the work of his foundation:

There are three things that modern agrotechnology brings to this seed improvement process. The first is simply the ability to gather plant samples from all over the world and use databases to keep track of thousands of plants grown under different conditions.

The second is sequencing and the third is transgenics, in case you were wondering. One of these days, I’d like to take Mr Gates down into Genebank Database Hell. But hey, we’re working on it. And the Foundation is helping.

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Keeping up to date with taxonomy made easier

Yesterday I was invited to submit one of my photos to the Flickr pool on Systematic Botany. Yes, I know. The media ought to be alerted. But I point this out less to draw attention to my photographic prowess than to highlight the fact that there is in fact a Flickr pool on Systematic Botany, and that it is a lot of fun. Exploring the discussion forum led me to an old news item about staff at the National Museum Cardiff and Kew naming a whole bunch of new Sorbus species, and not from some isolated corner of the world either, but England and Wales.

Some of these trees have probably developed recently and are examples of on-going evolution of new species. Others are older types which have been known for some time but are only now described as ‘species’ thanks to modern DNA methods.

Some Sorbus species have economic uses, and the taxonomy is made horrendously complicated by rampant hybridization and apomixis.

Coincidentally, IIALD had a piece on a new scheme “supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital taxonomic literature.” I wonder whether making photographs of plants available through Flickr or some other image sharing site might contribute to this worthy cause.

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Taro gets the social networking treatment

John Cho is a plant pathologist and taro breeder at the University of Hawaii. A few days ago he posted a youtube video on his Facebook wall. It shows some very successful trial results from the Dominican Republic. The experiment in question is the evaluation for taro leaf blight resistance of some hybrids from Dr Cho’s breeding programme. Unfortunately, the interview with pathologists Drs Graciela Godoy and Miguel Martínez of the Instituto Dominicano de Investigaciones Agropecuarias y Forestales (IDIAF) is in Spanish, and John doesn’t speak that language. So he asked his Facebook friends to help, and one of them, an agronomist from Puerto Rico, sent him a translation. Now John knows that the promising hybrids are 2002-21f (H2 to IDIAF), 2000-109 (H4) and MS3 (H6) — and so do we, 1 because John provided the gist of the results as a comment on the video on his wall. Isn’t social networking great? Now, if only that information would make it into some germplasm database. Any germplasm database.

LATER: It gets better. In the latest exchange of comments on the original video post, John’s Spanish-speaking agronomist friend tells him how some of his hybrids did in Puerto Rico. Who needs databases?

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What’s your favourite agrobiodiversity read?

A request comes in from our friend Danny Hunter. Help him out!

Now that the noughties have drawn to a close I would like to ask colleagues what they felt were their top agricultural biodiversity reads of the decade. It might be an article or a book. It might even be a blog or one of the new fangled ways of disseminating information. It could be something general or a specific piece of work that was fundamental to our understanding of agricultural biodiversity, how it is conserved, managed, utilised. As well as the details of the article or book, a brief explanation of why you thought the work important would be much appreciated.