Category: Information

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Potato news

A couple of Spud-U-Likes. Tuesday sees the opening of the International Symposium on Living with Potatoes (ISLP’08). Yes! And according to the conference organisers:

The objective of the ISLP’08 is to provide an international forum for sharing and exchanging information amongst the growers, associations, academicians, researchers, students, practitioners, and government who are interested in promoting the sustainability of potatoes–one of the top three staple foods.

Right. But what about bloggers? Anyone who is at the Symposium and who fancies joining the hallowed ranks of our Guest Bloggers need only send us an email.

And then there’s the wittily headlined Eyes peeled, a report in The Australian newspaper of writer Judith Elen’s potato-focused agro-tourism in the Andes, starting off at CIP, the International Potato Centre in Lima, Peru. Not just potatoes either, but a host of delicious goodies. Sent abroad to eat for her readers, what a great gig. Her conclusion:

Meanwhile, CIP continues its work in the background, conserving and researching native potatoes. The purple-fleshed varieties are especially high in antioxidants, stored in the pigment, while yellow-fleshed varieties are higher in available iron. Andean highlanders serve red, yellow (yema de huevo, egg-yolk potato) and blue in a single dish. But even along the Inca highway, some native varieties have been lost. In this, the UN’s international year of the potato, awareness is the key to keeping cultivation and research funds flowing.

Judith Elen was a guest of Centro Internacional de la Papa.

Money well spent, I’d say.

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Berry go round comes round again

The latest Berry Go Round — “your favorite botanical carnival” — is up at Gravity’s Rainbow. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: blog carnivals are a good way to expose yourself to something new, and there’s some nice new botany over there. But we also need to stay on message here, so I’ll single out two that deal with edibles. Verdure celebrates the bounty of autumn, while Laurent at Seedsaside treats us to a discourse on tomatillos.

While you snack on those, a question. Are there blog carnivals that might be of interest, that we don’t know about? Share, and we’ll do two things. Submit our own stuff, and bring back anything we discover there.

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Wheat database heaven?

The USDA is promising people like Luigi ((Remember when he was Lost in Genebank database hell?)) a get out of hell free card. Shiaoman Chao, a molecular geneticist, sequences and fingerprints thousands of wheat and barley samples sent to her by breeders around the country. The results can help breeders to decide whether a particular seedling is worth persevering with.

But those data on their own become much more valuable when they can be married to other kinds of information from other kinds of laboratory. Enter GrainGenes, “a treasure trove of genetic information about wheat, barley and other ‘small grains’ like rye, oats and triticale”.

Personally, I don’t have the knowledge to make use of GrainGenes, or any of the other massive portals dedicated to just a few crops each: maize, strawberry, potato and others. But there is help out there.

The bigger question is the extent to which all those portals can be brought together and interlinked with other kinds of data: where selections grow, their visible characteristics, their utility, etc. etc. I know there are people coming at this from the non-molecular side of things, but I do sometimes wonder whether they really have the chops (and the resources) to pull it off. If some of the gene-jockeys decided they wanted to do it, and could throw some of their brains, brawn and bucks at the problem, I reckon Luigi would have his lifeline sooner. And it might be more reliable.