Wild relatives

May 20, 2016May 2, 2018

Blogging the state of our plants

Our friend Nora Castañeda attended the State of the World’s Plants Symposium a couple of weeks back and was kind enough to send us some of her impressions. We’ll publish them in instalments over the next few days. Thanks, Nora.

Last week, Kew organized and hosted the very first State of the World’s Plants Symposium. The event was preceded by the publication of the State of the World’s Plants report, which this blog and other press outlets have mentioned already. The report is complemented by an interactive website that in a very user-friendly interface enables visitors to explore further details and useful data sources (some of the data sources are only available online).

The State of the World’s Plants report and symposium come at a perfect time. As Prof. Kathy Willis said in the introduction of the event, we currently have state of the world reports for a plethora of topics (including fathers), but not for plants. Until now. The report serves as a baseline of our current knowledge of plant diversity, the global threats that plants are currently and will face in the future, and the policies affecting plants. The idea is that for the next five years, we’ll see an annually updated global assessment of the state of our plants, where we’ll be able to gauge progress on the main topics addressed by the report.

As for the symposium, if I had to describe it in few words, I would say it was a series of interesting and captivating talks, combined with the participation of a very enthusiastic audience (we even became a trend on twitter with the hashtag #SOTWP. But I’d like to use the space of this and subsequent posts to share my own impressions of the symposium, together with some interesting links for the curious.

May 19, 2016May 19, 2016

Finding a good home for teosinte

Speaking of botanical gardens maintaining collections of crop diversity, this just in:

A large collection of Teosinte seed was recently transferred from Duke University to the Missouri Botanical Garden Seed Bank. Teosinte is the wild ancestor to modern corn and the preservation of its genetic material is important to corn research and supports the long term conservation of crop wild relatives. The collection includes seven different species in the genus Zea and will be stored in long-term freezer storage where it may remain viable for decades. We are in the process of accessioning, drying, counting and repackaging the seed for storage in the freezers.

The Duke collection is not mentioned either in WIEWS or the global maize conservation strategy, so it’s a little difficult to know how important it is. Interestingly, there is a maize collection mentioned in WIEWS from North Carolina State University, and that’s not that far from Duke, but still. Any way you slice it, there aren’t too many collections of wild maize relatives out there, according to the global strategy:

maize collections

It would arguably have been better for the collection to go to USDA, Ames (NCRPIS) or CIMMYT, but Rainer Bussmann, Director and William L. Brown Curator for Economic Botany at the Missouri Botanical Garden (MO) also made a perfectly good case for this option to me on Facebook:

Because we (MO) already had a (smaller) Teosinte collection, and we are housing a large corn collection, so this fit in perfectly.

So that’s another collection that the global strategy doesn’t know about. You can look for crop wild relatives on the PlantSearch database of Botanical Gardens Conservation International, but the secretive world of botanical gardens is such that this will only tell you that a particular plant exists in a garden collection somewhere, not which garden collection.

It doesn’t really matter where this Duke collection ends up, as long as it’s well taken care of, which it obviously will be at MO. But users also need to know where the stuff is, and get their hands on it. Isn’t it time botanical gardens and crop genebanks exchanged information a bit better? Rainer, how about putting the passport data on your new collection on Genesys?

May 19, 2016May 19, 2016

Nibbles: Botanical gardens, Glass flowers, Remarkable trees, Rhubarb history, Expensive pumpkin, Back to the future, Quinoa glut, Citrus greening biocontrol

All of BGCI’s ex situ surveys on one cool page. Have they re-modelled their website?
Harvard’s glass flowers are totally cool.
The world’s coolest trees.
Rhubarb is cooler than you think.
I’m not sure paying over a thousand pounds for a pumpkin seed is all that cool.
Conventional breeding is cooler than genetic engineering. Cool quote of the week: “I tell my students they should drop acid before they go to the field, and just look at the plants and let them tell you what they are doing.”
Is the coolness over for quinoa? Jeremy unavailable for comment.
Cool Pakistani bug may help with citrus greening in the US. But don’t stop looking for resistance, y’all.

May 16, 2016May 31, 2016

Brainfood: Banana GWAS, Yeast genebanks, Hybrid sorghum, How to intensify ecologically, Med pastures, Food services, Neolithic transition, Ploughing the savanna

A Genome-Wide Association Study on the Seedless Phenotype in Banana (Musa spp.) Reveals the Potential of a Selected Panel to Detect Candidate Genes in a Vegetatively Propagated Crop. One strong candidate gene, from 6 possible regions. And here’s the light version.
Yeast culture collections in the twenty-first century: New opportunities and challenges. Pretty much the same as plant genebanks.
Genetic variation in sorghum as revealed by phenotypic and SSR markers: implications for combining ability and heterosis for grain yield. Possible parents for hybrids identified.
Actionable knowledge for ecological intensification of agriculture. Look at the landscape, articulate trade-offs and don’t forget the social dynamics.
Taxonomic and functional diversity in Mediterranean pastures: Insights on the biodiversity–productivity trade-off. Somebody mention trade-offs?
Are the major imperatives of food security missing in ecosystem services research? Pretty much.
Reproductive trade-offs in extant hunter-gatherers suggest adaptive mechanism for the Neolithic expansion. Agriculture got you laid, but then killed you.
High carbon and biodiversity costs from converting Africa’s wet savannahs to cropland. Bad idea all round.

May 15, 2016May 16, 2016

Talking non-biotech strawberries and citrus

If the recent post on the UC Davis Strawberry Wars whetted your appetite, the Talking Biotech podcast can help with a leisurely run-through the history of the crop and efforts to breed it from Kevin Folta and his guest, Dr Jim Hancock, strawberry breeder from Michigan State University. Where things are not as wild as at Davis, apparently. It’s a fascinating story of global interdependence in genetic resources, and the importance of crop wild relatives. And, it turns out the first scientifically bred crop variety was a strawberry. Since I’m at it, the episode on citrus was pretty good too. But Kevin, how about some more explicit recognition of the importance of genetic resources collections (i.e. genebanks) in all this work?