Category: Nutrition

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Aren’t steroids illegal?

Karl, from Inoculated Mind, describes Nature magazine’s selection of plant scientist Richard Sayre (as one of five crop scientists who could change the world) as “a good pick.” Sayre’s pet project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is to build a super cassava; 500 g will contain the daily requirements of protein, vitamin A and E, iron and zinc. Karl describes BioCassava Plus as “like golden rice on steroids.” And I guess whether you think that’s a good thing or not depends on what you think of Golden Rice and what you think of steroids.

We’ve crossed swords on Golden Rice before now; I’m not going to go there. I’ll just repeat that I remain unconvinced that Golden Rice will measurably increase the nutritional health of people outside the mostly urban market economy, and that if they were to increase their vitamin A precursor intake with other foods it would, in my view, deliver greater total good.

I’ve made my thoughts on super cassava known too. And again, I repeat the fundamental question; when you have engineered one variety of cassava and planted it across Africa, how are you going to respond when the entire population falls prey to a newly virulent form of some disease?

The answer to nutritional deficiencies is not a super variety of any staple. It is diversity. People in the cities might be able to afford super-staples, and the farmers supplying it might do OK. But they will not help poor farmers either to earn a living or to improve their own nutrition.

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Great Expectations

Nature has a (behind paywall) feature on Five crop researchers who could change the world. Rather than celebrating those who have arrived, Emma Marris highlights the work of five researchers who still have some way to go before reaching the Food Hall of Fame.

These are her picks.

Peter Dodds (CSIRO, Australia) works on the fundamentals of wheat stem rust. He investigates the substances that the rust fungus excretes, and the plant could use to trigger a defense reaction. He hopes to engineer new and more complex resistance, that the rust might not be able to break. Seems particularly relevant in the light of the UG99 scare.

Jerry Glover is a crop perennializer at the Land Institute, in Kansas, USA. The folks at the Land Institute want us to move from annual to perennial crops. That would be better for the soil and would take much less energy (nitrogen) to produce. They are clearly in it for the long run, but here’s a short and palatable piece about it.

Zhang Jinghua (Hong Kong Baptist University) works on deficit irrigation. The theory is that under modest water stress plants shift all their resources to reproduction and hence grain yield can increase. One trick in his book, and that of Australian grape growers, is ‘partial root zone drying’. Some roots are dry, and signal the need to fill the seeds, while other roots can access the water that is needed to keep producing. Water saving is particularly important in increasingly water scarce Northern China.

Richard Sayre, the director of the Institute for Renewable Fuels, Missouri, USA, was selected because he heads the BioCassava Plus collaboration. They are hoping to develop genetically modified cassava of which 500 g contains the daily requirements of protein, vitamin A and E, iron and zinc ((What will be left to do? Fluorescence to lighten up the nights, and the ability to use the root as cell phone battery?)). They have succeeded in transformations for individual traits, now they have to figure out how to artificially transfer 15 genes into a single variety.

Julian Hibberd (U. of Cambridge) studies photosynthesis. He is one of the brains in the C4 rice consortium led by IRRI. They are trying to create rice plants with C4 rather than C3 photosynthesis. C4 photosynthesis is more efficient at high temperature, and it could be the next big thing (after short straw) to radically elevate rice yield potential — “by a whopping 50%” ((Will they also re-engineer the straw so that it can carry all that grain?)), thinks Hibberd. Seems far fetched, but C4-ness has independently evolved in many plant families, so why not another time, with a little help?

An interesting group, but did Nature miss anyone? Perhaps in branches of research less dominated by biotech? Let us know.

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Nibbles: Wikiforéts, Super-rape, Gut microbiome, Soybeans, Golf courses, Chestnuts, Rice, Yeast

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Ancient wheats brought up to date in Hungary

Quite by coincidence, while Luigi was digesting cereal diversity and nutrition, I was reading about an effort to bring ancient wheats up to date, also centred in Hungary. Geza Kovács of the Agricultural Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has overseen a project that looked at 250 einkorn (Triticum monococcum) and 130 emmer (T. dicoccum) samples from various genebanks and screened them to see how well they performed and what kind of grain they produced. The best 20 were selected for further breeding, with a particular eye on their performance in organic systems and how well they met the needs of end users such as bakers and consumers. ((I found a brief report in the Bulletin of the Organic Research Centre, and I am trying to source a published paper.))

Two particularly promising new einkorn varieties emerged, with “acceptable” yield compared to a bread wheat and significantly higher protein content. Other varieties have undetectable levels of gluten, which might make them suitable for people with gluten allergies. Some are also high in fat-soluble anti-oxidants. Some of the new emmers also show great promise, with protein levels higher than standard bread wheat and a high level of carotenoids.

Kovács also speculates that some of the new varieties may be a good source to resurrect the production of ancient foods such as frikeh. This is made from wheat, harvested at a critical point when the seeds are plump but still green and not yet mature. The seeds are dried and then burned. Frikeh is delicious — I tried some in Aleppo once — and could be an excellent snack for health-conscious consumers, and those who just want to eat something good that preserves diversity.