Category: Neglected species

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News from the front: Belize

As far as I know, it has more species of trees, shrubs, bushes, herbs, and grasses than any domestic garden on Earth: 318 species of flowering plants, 250 of which are native to Belize. That’s about 15 percent of the indigenous floristic diversity of the whole country, more species of native plants than live in the forest that surrounds it. Every plant is here for a purpose, used as medicine, food, thatch, fiber, because it attracts butterflies, birds, and mammals, or just because of its beauty.

The garden is Masewal, in western Belize, and the words are from an article in Orion magazine that describes this astonishing place. The vision of one man, who sought to reclaim some of his Mayan heritage and has been doing so for 31 years, using the garden as store-house, teaching aid and demonstration plot. Fascinating.

Belize was my first experience of a tropical forest and I remember the giddiness of it. I wrote something about it back then; I wonder whether I can dig it out.

via Metafilter.

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Mutant teff

Sometimes a crop just doesn’t have the genes for it, as a good friend of mine who dabbled in taro breeding used to say. So then you have to try something else. “Zerihun Tadele is using the latest biotechnological methods to produce dwarf tef lines in order to prevent lodging, which causes significant yield losses.” The technique involved is TILLING (Targeting Induced Local Lesions IN Genomes), an automated methods for inducing, and then detecting, potentially useful point mutations. But is there really no short(ish) teff variety among the 4743 accessions in the genebank of Ethiopia’s Institute of Biodiversity Conservation? By the way, IBC has just won the Sultan Qaboos Environmental Preservation Prize. Congratulations!

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It’s good for you, mate

I’ve tasted mate tea, made from the herb Ilex paraguariensis, and I have to say it is a mystery to me how so many Argentinians (and others) could be totally hooked on the stuff. Maybe because they knew all along it was so good for them. ((A comprehensive review was published in the Journal of food Science.)) Now science agrees. Elvira de Majia, of the University of Illinois, discovered that mate drinkers in her lab had greater activity in an enzyme that increases HDL (good) cholesterol while lowering LDL (bad) cholesterol. On that basis, and mate’s many other health benefits, she secured a deal with Argentina to study in detail 84 different varieties of mate, including wild populations. According to the press release:

“Our studies show that some of the most important antioxidant enzymes in the body are induced by this herbal tea,” said de Mejia of her study in September’s Planta Medica. ((Which is here, but you need to be a subscriber.))

“Because Argentina has the different mate varieties, we’ll be able to do more comparisons and characterizations between the different genotypes and the benefits of different growing conditions—whether in sun (on a plantation) or in shade (under the rainforest canopy),” she added.

There’s also interest in adding the active ingredient(s) to processed food. There always is.