Category: Uncategorized

That’s the title of a talk to be given by Paul Gepts in the “Dr. Guillermo Soberón” Auditorium of the Centro de Ciencias Genómicas on the UNAM campus in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico. It’s at 5pm on 15 February. If anyone out there is planning to go, and would like to blog it for us, the door is always open to that sort of thing.

Overall, we must conclude that claims of a global crisis in agricultural pollination are untrue.

That’s from a New Scientist digest of a Current Biology paper by the authors themselves. ((Thanks to Michael for the headsup.)) Roughly, the argument is that (1) bees are responsible for the production of a lot of our food, yes, but not that much; (2) pollinators are declining, yes, but not worldwide, and probably not irreversibly; and (3) pollinator decline can threaten agricultural yield, yes, but it hasn’t actually done so yet. The data come from a huge FAO dataset of “yield, and total production and cultivated area of pollinator-dependent and nondependent crops.”

But not so fast. The relatively small proportion of agricultural production that depends on pollinators has quadrupled during the past 50 years. So if there’s no pollinator crisis now, there may well soon be one.

In following up a recent University of Nottingham press release (nibbled a few days ago) on a project to breed vegetables with higher levels of Ca and Mg I came across an earlier, related project by the principal investigator, Dr Martin Broadley. This was to evaluate P-use efficiency (PUE) in Brassica oleracea as a model system. There’s lots of genetics, but also this objective:

Determine the PUE of up to 50 commercial B. oleracea varieties and 400 varieties from the HRI Genetic Resources Unit (GRU) representing a wide geographical and genetic distribution of B. oleracea and close relatives

And this deliverable:

A database of Brassica oleracea PUE phenotypes. This database will identify the range of PUE in modern varieties. This will allow varieties to be matched to their nutritional environment. The range of PUE found in accessions in the HRI-Genetic Resources Unit (GRU) will also be defined. This database will be delivered to growers, via a summary factsheet and subsequent consultation.

Cool, I thought. Rather complicated evaluation information on an important collection made readily available to users (breeders, growers, researchers) in a natty database. I had visions of Andy Jarvis and his crew mapping the provenance of accessions on soils base maps to look for correlations between PRU and low P. Problem is, though the dataset is probably somewhere on brassica.info, I wasn’t able to track it down in over half an hour of messing around. No doubt I’m missing something which is right in front of my nose. Alas, the link provided in the project final report seems to be broken. I suspect the data I’m looking for is lurking in the supplementary tables on the project webpage at Defra, but a bunch of spreadsheets is not really what was promised. Another soul-sapping foray into genebank database hell.