(Not much) agrobiodiversity on display in Nairobi museum

The main building of the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi has had a facelift, courtesy of the EU. Pretty good job on the outside, but the new exhibits were a bit of a disappointment.

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There’s a big hall about Kenya’s animals, of course, and another series of displays about its cultures, arranged by life-stages (birth, youth, adolescence, initiation: you get the picture), though this includes very little about agriculture:

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But there’s nothing at all on the country’s ecosystems and protected areas, and nothing on its plants, at least inside the building (apart from a display of an herbarium specimen in the small hall describing the museum’s history). There is a little botanic garden dedicated to medicinal plants (arranged by family, the wisdom of which is debatable), but this misses the opportunity of describing the Amaranthus on display as not just a medicinal but also a nutritious traditional leafy green (see my next post):

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However, the entrance hall does have a terrific display of cucurbit diversity:

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These bottle gourds are used by the Maasai and other pastoralists to store water, milk, blood, and mixtures thereof. Here’s a close-up:

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Taro in the Indo-Pacific

The 19th Congress of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association is going to take place 29 Nov.-5 Dec. 2009 at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences Conference Centre, Hanoi, Vietnam. One of the suggested sessions is on taro:

Wet Cultivation of Colocasia esculenta in the Indo-Pacific: Archaeological, Technological, Social, and Biological Perspectives.

David Addison (American Samoa Community College) and Matthew Spriggs (Australian National University)
add1ison(at)gmail.com; matthew.spriggs(at)anu.edu.au

Wet cultivation of taro (Colocasia esculenta) is among the most productive traditional agricultural techniques in the world, rivaled only by the homologous systems based on rice (Oryza sativa). Some of the largest stone constructions in the Pacific relate to wet taro cultivation. Research on wet taro in Oceania has focused on: the role of agricultural intensification in development of political and social complexity; aggression and territoriality; risk management; and initial island colonization. This session seeks to bring together researchers from across the Indo-Pacific region to discuss the wet cultivation of Colocasia esculenta from diverse perspectives. Participants will be asked to have papers ready for posting to a website by 1 October 2009. This will give everyone a chance to read each other’s ideas in detail. The IPPA session will then consist of short presentations and ample time for discussion. Selected participants will be asked to revise their papers immediately after the conference for publication in an edited volume scheduled for early 2010.

Thanks to Lois Englberger for the tip.

Domestication trifecta

We’ve blogged a number of times about the paradigm shift that’s occurring among students of plant domestication, driven by increasing interaction and synergy between archaeologists and geneticists. The idea of “rapid, localised” domestication is down if not out: all the talk these days is of domestication as a protracted, multi-locational and biologically complex process.

Well, there’s a very nice review of the history of this shift in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, at least as it concerns the crops domesticated in the Fertile Crescent. It is only very recently that geneticists have looked at their molecular data in the light of archaeological results and realized that there were other ways to interpret them apart from the conventional idea of domestication in one place over the course of a few human generations.

Meanwhile, a paper in Annals of Botany looks at another source of data, i.e. written sources. Chinese investigators have looked at references to eggplants in ancient encyclopedias, concordances and even poetry, and charted changes in size, shape and taste over the past 2000 years. The oldest reference dates back to 59 BC, and since then the Chinese eggplant has gone from round to a variety of shapes, has increased dramatically in size, and has become much sweeter.

Finally, our friend Hannes Dempewolf and co-authors have a paper in GRACE which looks in detail at domestication in the Compositae. Why have only a handful of species in this family been fully domesticated? Secondary defence compounds, inulin as a storage product and wind dispersal, the authors suggest.

Mendel’s Garden No. 27: Genes, but not as we know them

Mendel.jpg Happy Befana from a freezing Rome. Got myself in a bit of a tizz with all this Blog Carnivalia stuff. I thought I was hosting Mendel’s Garden here, but it seems I agreed to do it at The Other Place instead. Not sure why, especially after my recent idleness there. So I decided to cross-post here, just in case readers are aching for a slab of hard science.

Quintessence of Dust examines one of the challenges to evolutionary theory, that large populations will adapt more rapidly because they contain a greater range of beneficial mutations lying in wait, as it were, for conditions to change. Only, it ain’t so. Steve Matheson explains new investigations of clonal interference and the difference it makes to estimates of mutation rates and speed of adaptation. Also, it touches on sex.

There’s a new kid on the block too. Ian Dworkin has just launched Genes Gone Wild, which he says will distinguish between “Gene X for Disease Y” — as seen on the news — and “a variant of gene X influences disease Y”. Yes, Ian says, “things are sadly more complicated than we might like”. Good luck with your mission Ian.

As I contemplate a “procedure” (ghastly euphemism) myself, I’m attracted to Sandra’s post Personalized Medicine is on the way (but not quick enough) over at Discovering Biology in a Digital World. Genetic screening can offer all sorts of useful and valuable information, but only if the patient and the doctor know how to make use of the results. Sandra’s point is that things are moving so quickly that we’re all in danger of being left behind — and if you want a reason to catch up, perhaps a lawsuit would focus your attention.

A little technical argie-bargie is getting aired over at Evolgen, where RPM asks, only somewhat rhetorically, Do people still use microarrays? They do, but there are other techniques they could be using, and perhaps getting better answers. Having laboured mightily, long ago, to understand both Sanger and Maxam-Gilbert, and more recently to get to grips with Solexa, I’ll just say, There’ll always be a better tool just around the corner.

And now, if I may be permitted, allow me to introduce all super-duper, shining, modern, sequence-reading geneticists to a woman who is, I swear, the living incarnation of Mendel’s Garden. Rebsie Fairholm is following in The Monk’s footsteps with a pea breeding project that is, to me at any rate, the most fascinating thing on the web at the moment. Her latest post on the subject is Welcome home, little peas, but every single one of the posts in her pea-breeding project is worth reading.

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Rebsie’s explanations and photographs will bring Mendel’s Garden to life for you, your loved ones, your students, and indeed the entire curious world. Speaking of which, I don’t seem to recall Larry Moran’s post Identity of the Product of Mendel’s Green Cotyledon Gene (Update) getting any exposure, so I will further abuse my privileged position by linking to it now.

And if you’ve made it this far, you’ll be waiting for me to blow our own trumpet. So here goes: The hype goes on, and El Hombre de la Papa, a video of Carlos Ochoa, who died last month. Two very different takes on the application of Mendelian genetics to feeding people.

Next host for Mendel’s Garden is Steve Matheson hisself, at Quintessence of Dust. Submit posts to Steve or via the Blog Carnival page. You could also volunteer to host..

Nibbles: Journal, Biofuel source, Old seeds, Bees, Aquaculture, Millennium Seed Bank, Pests, Earthworms, Jellyfish, Cuba, Japan, Kerala, Queensland, Goats, Cacao, Savanna, Global maps, Nepal