Category: Information

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Tangled Bank 112

There was a bit of a mix up over the blog carnival Tangled Bank, which was supposed to appear last week, while its organizer was swanning around the Galapagos, presumably with other things on his mind. Well it is up now, with a couple of treats. One, alas, is broken. Tangled Banks says that “insects have been selecting hotter hot peppers for some time now. Andrew Bernardin at the Evolving Mind blog points out that “Mexican Food was Not Intelligently Designed.” Alas, Andrew’s blog at Evolving Mind seems to be a bit broken. And it is neat; the heat in chillies protects them from a fungus that destroys the seeds, but is ignored by birds, who disperse the seeds. My question: do birds detect chilli heat, but fail to be put off by it? Or are they completely oblivious to its presence? I mean, could you teach a bird to distinguish seed with chilli from seed without chilli?

The other treat is GrrlScientist, who takes that gray horse paper we blogged a while ago and really goes to town on it, complete with photos, graphs, and movie allusions.

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SINGER’s new tune

After my intemperate comment about SINGER the other day, I’m very happy to pass on the news that the new SINGER website is now online at http://singer.cgiar.org. According to the announcement made by Bioversity International, the new SINGER has the following features:

  • GIS maps using Google technology.
  • Users are able to search accessions using Google Maps.
  • Presentation of data in a cumulative format to help users do statistical analysis.
  • Improved presentation of distribution data including across genus and species.
  • Improved navigation and searching capabilities.
  • Free text search.
  • Links to the external databases hosted by partners to provide additional information about accessions. Example: IRRI. Click on the “IRRI Link” under links on this page to view the information.
  • Users are able to view the available pedigree information on the site. Example: IRRI, WARDA, CIP. Please look for the “Pedigree” field under passport information.
  • Users are able to view the availability of an accession before requesting germplasm. The “Availability” field has been added under passport information.
  • Users are able to view if the accession has been placed under long term storage in Svalbard. The “Svalbard” field has been added. Example: WARDA. Please look for the “Safety-duplicate in Svalbard” field under passport information.
  • Users are able to save the search history while they are navigating the site.
  • Users are able to download data in the “xml” and “csv” formats.
  • The shopping cart system has been incorporated – work is still in progress to incorporate the complete shopping cart for an ordering system.
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Another feel-good crop wild relative story

When I saw news stories a short while back about a new peanut variety called Tifguard, famous for having resistance to both peanut root-knot nematode and tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV), the main question I had was where the resistance(s) came from. So I consulted our resident peanut expert, and it turns out that the nematode resistance gene in Tifguard came from the variety COAN. Which in turn got it from the wild relative Arachis cardenasii. And by conventional breeding, no less.

Although saying that glosses over the fact that Charles Simpson‘s introgression programme at Texas A&M sometimes involved making more than a thousand meticulous interspecific crosses just to get a single seed. Nobody ever said using crop wild relatives in breeding programmes was easy! Anyway, this is a truly exemplary case of what can be done to incorporate genes from crop wild relatives into improved cultivars using “conventional” breeding methods.

Not much A. cardenasii in GRIN or SINGER. ((Although I’m sorry to say I wasn’t actually able to get SINGER to give me much more than the total number of accessions, and that after a bit of a struggle. Who knows, maybe our resident peanut expert can do something about that. Anyway, do let me know if you have better luck.)) GBIF adds data from a couple of herbaria, but in total we’re talking about no more than about 30 records or so, some of which are no doubt duplicates.

MUCH LATER: Follow-up, with live links!

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Soil: don’t treat it like dirt

That headline, seen on a few big ol’ pickup trucks in the US, only really works in the US, where people do have a strange habit of referring to soil as dirt. But pop on over to National Geographic magazine this month for a full discussion of the state of US soil. It’s the basis of everything else that grows, and an amazing repository of agrobiodiversity, and all too often people do treat it as dirt.