Category: Vegetables

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TraitAbility and the Treaty

I don’t know enough about either vegetable breeding or intellectual property protection to venture a guess as to the significance to that industry of Syngenta’s new online effort to streamline the licensing of some of their varieties and associated enabling technologies, which they’re calling TraitAbility. I’m not even sure what success would look like, either for Syngenta or anybody else. Alexander Tokarz, Syngenta’s Head of Vegetables ((Not just Head of Lettuce, he is the first to point out.)) suggested at last week’s event accompanying the launch of the TraitAbility portal that he might well be happier if other companies were to follow suit with similar opening-up initiatives in the next couple of years than if he were to be inundated with e-licenses from day one. Full disclosure: I know that because I was there, at Syngenta’s invitation:

No word yet from either those other companies, potential licensees, or indeed growers. But nevermind all that. I still think TraitAbility may turn out to be quite important, for two related reasons. First, because it’s a clear parallel to the International Treaty, at least in the sense that — in albeit a smaller, more halting way, and at the other end of the variety development pipeline — it is ostensibly trying to make access to genetic diversity and technologies simpler and more transparent. Which suggests the intriguing possibility that the ITPGRFA, if it didn’t actually force anyone’s hand, at least in some way paved the way, or helped create the space, for what Syngenta at any rate is heralding as something of an innovation. And second, because, whether or not there was in fact such a causal link with the ITPGRFA, the parallel which is indubitably there might suggest to Syngenta that some of that license money should maybe flow back into conservation. Innovation is needed all along that pipeline to make it sustainable, not just at the business end.

LATER:

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Nibbles: Disasters, Quinoa, Filipino fruit, Cape Verde nutrition, ICARDA lentils, Ecosystem services

  • Sweet potato cuttings to the rescue in Fiji. Hope there’s a nice mix of varieties.
  • Quinoa: and so it begins.
  • Filipinos not eating their fruits. Bad for Filipino health, no doubt bad for Filipino agrobiodiversity too.
  • Maybe they should look to Cape Verde?
  • ICARDA waxes poetic about lentils.
  • Ecosystem services mapping projects go online. Or they will do, eventually. Just a survey for now. Should that include in situ CWR conservation projects? Now’s your chance to have your say.
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Brainfood: Climate in Cameroon, Payments for Conservation, Finger Millet, GWAS, Populus genome, miRNA, C4, Cadastres, Orange maize, Raised beds, Contingent valuation, Wild edibles, Sorghum genomics, Brazilian PGR, Citrus genomics

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Nibbles: Mashua info, Veggies programme, Rice research, Genomes!, Indian malnutrition, Forest map, British agrobiodiversity hero, GMO “debate”, Lactose tolerance, Beer

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The history of the tomato

One reason to love the internets, back into which, fully refreshed, we plunge, is this comment:

[T]he plant Galen mentions is the λυκοπέρσιον, lykopersion, not lykopersikon. The name means ravager or slayer of wolves, like our wolfsbane. The transition to the “wolf-peach” happened sometime later, probably a scribe’s error. Liddell-Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon describes it as an Egyptian plant with strong-smelling, yellowish juice and identifies it as Hyoscyamus muticus, one of the very poisonous, tropane-bearing Solanaceae. There are plenty of other seriously deadly Solanaceae in Egypt but this is as good a guess as any.

That’s from Pat the Plant ((Who may or may not be Patrick Garvey; it’s astonishing what a search turns up.)) in response to this (very familiar) bit in a long and fascinating post about the tomato from Hollis at In the Company of Plants and Rocks.

“Lycopersicum” means “wolf peach”, and probably was selected by Linnaeus from the classical literature. Lycopersicon was a plant described by the Roman physician Galen as being both delicious and dangerous — appropriate for the tomato during Linnaeus’s time (see discussion below). No one has figured out what Galen’s lycopersicon actually was, and there’s no reason to think it was the tomato of the Americas, given that he lived in Europe during the second century AD. (“Wolf peach” is sometimes attributed to German were-wolf legends, for example here).

I found Hollis’ post, somewhat belatedly, via the latest Berry go Round, hosted by Susannah at On the other hand. Being partly responsible for BGR, I feel bad that it has been a little hit and miss lately, and glad that Susannah is going to feed and water it going forward until it is once again bursting with the best botany blogging the internets can offer. Why not submit your own work?