- All about the International Treaty on PGRFA.
- More, much more, on that climate change hotspots study.
- IDRC on climate change adaptation in Africa. Almost nothing on agricultural diversity as a coping mechanism.
- Unlike this.
- Or this, for that matter. Never knew the Basque country was such a hotbed of potato research.
- Or…oh forget it.
- What, in the name of all that is happy, is hopniss?
- Danone buys some goodwill.
- Fairtrade chocolate: this looks like it should be really important. Is it?
- So, you say you want to know what plant remains were found in the baskets in Tutankhamun’s tomb?
- Bolivian agricultural biodiversity, anyone?
Brainfood: Baby’s veggies, Chickpea and drought, Vine cactus breeding, Paleolithic rabbits, California protected areas, Wild pigeonpea, Pecorino classification, Milk composition, Phenotyping, Wild peas
- Vegetables by Stealth: an exploratory study investigating the introduction of vegetables in the weaning period. Sneaking them into the diet is the most common strategy used by mothers to introduce their kids to vegetables. Reeeeeally?
- Assessment of Iranian chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) germplasms for drought tolerance. Four out of 150 local landraces showed promise. It really is a numbers game, isn’t it?
- In situ induction of chromosome doubling in vine cacti (Cactaceae). Potentially valuable autopolyploids were produced. Not that it was easy or anything.
- Who brought in the rabbits? Taphonomical analysis of Mousterian and Solutrean leporid accumulations from Gruta Do Caldeirão (Tomar, Portugal). People did, that’s who, but only during the later Upper Paleolithic. Before that it was mainly owls.
- Protected areas in climate space: What will the future bring? Nothing good. Both novel and disappearing climates are over-represented in current protected areas, at least in California.
- Progress in the utilization of Cajanus platycarpus (Benth.) Maesen in pigeonpea improvement. Baby steps.
- Classification of pecorino cheeses using electronic nose combined with artificial neural network and comparison with GC-MS analysis of volatile compounds. Wait, there are different kinds of pecorino?
- The need for country specific composition data on milk. Well, you’ve got me convinced.
- Rate-distortion tradeoff to optimize high-throughput phenotyping systems. Application to X-ray images of seeds. So, let me get this straight, basically, gauging the optimal trade-off between speed and accuracy in high-throughput phenotyping systems depends on what you’re measuring? Who writes these grant applications?
- Experimental growing of wild pea in Israel and its bearing on Near Eastern plant domestication. First pea growers were either very patient or very quick workers.
The revenge of characterization data
It is a truth universally acknowledged that characterization data are useless to breeders. Well, universally acknowledged by breeders anyway. Morphological data are all well and good for genebank curators looking for duplicates and old-fashioned taxonomists, they say. But what we need is evaluation data, and lots of it.
As usual, I exaggerate; for effect, as usual. But I think it would certainly be true to say that detailed morphological descriptions of germplasm are not the highest priority thing breeders want out of genetic resources databases. That would probably be information on resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses.
And yet a paper just out in Euphytica shows that the former can be clues to the latter. A team at IRRI 1 looked at the susceptibility of rice to sheath blight, an important disease throughout rice-growing areas, especially under intensive systems. 2 They measured how 200 accessions did when inoculated with Rhizoctonia solani in the field. So far, so conventional.
But because the accessions were very carefully chosen (out of a total of over 100,000 in the IRRI genebank), the team, which included the genebank manager, were able to estimate to what extent differences in disease intensity were due to plant and canopy architecture — in other words, morphology — and how much to genetic susceptibility.
The accessions tested were selected to represent contrasting morphologies (based on leaf length, leaf angle and number of tillers, typical characterization descriptors), different phenologies (number of days to 80% flowering) and all the major varietal groups (indica, aus, aromatic, temperate, japonica and tropical japonica). It turned out that the lowest levels of disease intensity were found on a particular morpho-phenological group, and that this effect of morphology on disease intensity was much greater than any effect of genetic group, although the aus varietal group was markedly superior to the others.
The authors therefore recommend that breeders looking for sources of reduced susceptibility to sheath blight will find it most efficient to select taller accessions with wider leaves. Let us see what the breeders think. I’ll post this on GIPB and report back if there’s any reaction.
Regenerating Iraqi wheat
Our friend Mrs Sanaa and her colleagues have been regenerating wheat accessions dating back to before the Iraqi genebank at Abu Ghraib was destroyed in 2003. You’ll remember that she rescued this material by storing it at her house until the genebank got back on its feet. Many thanks to her for the photos.
CIAT and climate change and blogging
“Using blogs and new media to tell the story of climate change and adaptation”, did you say? Let CIAT show you how. On the same day, their multifarious blogs sport a post on the new climate change book on the block, “Crop Adaptation to Climate Change,” from Wiley, to which they have contributed massively. And also a handy summary of the CGIAR Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security Research Program’s “Mapping hotspots of climate change and food insecurity in the global tropics,” CIAT being the lead centre in CCAFS. There’s also a press release on the hotspots report. However, if the word “hotspots” conjures up visions of the possibility of precisely and reasonably narrowly targeted interventions, beware. In this game, as in many, I suppose, it really does all depend. This below is as good a candidate for the money map as any. But you really do have to read the whole thing, and look at all the maps. And there’s a lot of them. They’ll all be available as Google Earth files soon, right guys?
LATER: And they make it into Time!