- What’s the difference between pluots and plumcots? By the guy who wrote the book.
- ACIAR publication on village chickens, and another. Thanks, DAD-Net.
- Modeling the axolotl, the edible Mexican salamander, before it’s too late.
- Artisanal fishing data. Via.
- USDA looking to expand its fruit collection to cope with climate change. NOt the only ones, I imagine.
- Danes stamp on allotments. No, wait. Allotments on Danish stamps.
- Aussies find genetic marker for hornless cattle that will jump on barbie by themselves.
- Breeding better Artemisia annua.
- The diversity of farmer-managed aquatic systems in SE Asia.
- 15% of angiosperm speciation events are accompanied by ploidy increase. Much more in domesticated species, I bet.
Mapping Argentinian pests and diseases
The Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria in Argentina has a new online pest and disease atlas out. It’s in Spanish, but pretty intuitive to use. You can search by host or by pest/disease organism. And you get a bunch of references, descriptive notes, photos and a map, albeit a static one — not sure how updating will be done. Below is the distribution of Setosphaeria turcica, the causal agent of Northern Leaf Blight in corn, for example. Would be interesting to mash this kind of thing up with the distribution of tolerant material. Must look into that. And of course one could do some climate change prediction modeling too. Thanks to IIALD.
Getting to the bottom of potato late blight resistance
There’s a bit of an argy-bargy developing in the comments to Robert’s provocative post Inorganic farming. Anastasia raised the question of transgenics for fungal resistance, which Robert echoed. Patrick then waded in bullishly to ask why transgenics were needed, when breeder Tom Wagner “has created quite a number of potato lines totally resistant to late blight”. And that created a clamour from Robert to the effect that he couldn’t find any evidence of Wagner’s success on this front.
Two points.
First, although Patrick was perhaps too modest to say so, he has arranged for Tom Wagner to be at a meeting in Oxford, England, as part of a Greater European Tour that Tom is undertaking in the autumn. So anyone who wants to know about his selections for late blight resistance can get it straight from the horse’s mouth. And report it here, please.
Secondly, don’t panic. Scientists at the University of Dundee in Scotland and elsewhere have discovered a single gene that, they say, is the key to blight resistance. “We are really excited by the discovery of RXLR. This has provided a signature to search for proteins that are delivered inside host cells, where they may be exposed to plant defence surveillance systems,” said Professor Paul Birch, the team leader. Clearly it won’t be long before the threat of late blight is a thing of the past.
Nibbles: Seed Conference, High carotenoid bananas, DIVA-GIS, Protected area map, Pulse domestication, Food policy, Torreya rewilding
- The 2nd World Seed Conference is coming up soon.
- Orange bananas make it big in the Solomon Islands. Thanks, Lois.
- DIVA-GIS website gets a makeover. Watch out for the blog.
- Global protected areas map mashed up.
- Dorian Fuller blogs lentil and bean domestication.
- Bookforum.com does food.
- While people discuss the pros and cons of assisted migration, one group has actually gone out and done it.
Pssst! Wanna pollinate pumpkins?
I was cleaning out a mailbox the other day, and came across a message from Karl Haro von Mogel, who is quite well known around these parts. He was advising me that his new pollination video — on Cucurbits — had just been uploaded to YouTube. And I forgot to write about it. Apologies to Karl, but I’ll make it up in a minute.
The video is clearly aimed at the more industrial end of the spectrum. Bringing parent plants into a greenhouse was never an option for me. On the other hand, wandering through the pumpkin patch soon after dawn to gather ripe male flowers that had not quite opened was one of the great treats of saving my own seeds. And Karl deals with more than just controlled pollination. The first 3 1/2 minutes gives a good overview of cucurbit diversity, centres of origin and wild relatives. And near the end he reveals the secrets of the seedless watermelon. All in all, well worth 10 minutes of your life, even if you plan never to pollinate a pumpkin.
In his email Karl mentioned that he had entered the video for a competition at Chlorofilms. It was one of 17 2nd prize winners. So were some of his other films, including this one on pepper breeding.
Maybe if we could rustle up “at least $8000” in prize money we’d get some entries to our own competitions. Or maybe we should just enter the next Chlorofilms competition, if and when it happens.