Category: Wild relatives

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Invisible Angola

Kew botanist David Goyder had a thought-provoking blog post a couple of days back describing the relative lack of floristic data from Angola. Here’s his map of plant collection data for southern Africa, from GBIF:

GBIF Angola_2015_6a

Angola emerges quite clearly as a gap, particularly the interior. There’s lots of reasons for that, not least landmines, as Goyder points out, and there are also efforts underway to redress the situation. But the thought that the map provoked in me was, of course, whether the situation was similar for crops. So here’s what Genesys knows about crop germaplasm collections in southern Africa:

Angola genesys

It seems the answer is a pretty resounding yes. Again, you can clearly trace the borders of Angola by where the genebank accessions end. There is, in fact, though, a very active national genebank in Angola, which has been collecting the country’s crop diversity for years, landmines or no landmines:

A total of 441 accessions were collected during a mult-crop collection in Huila province, Namibi province and Malanga province in 2004. With these collections, NPGRC now has a representative sample from 55% of the total number of districts in the country and representing 60% of the recognized agricultural zones (MIIA).

But when will we be able to see the data?

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Rational botanical gardens

The 7th European Botanic Gardens Congress is on this week, in Paris. You can follow it in all the usual ways, or most of them anyway. I was struck by this tweet from the opening day, of a slide from the presentation by new BGCI director Paul Smith. Sounds a lot like what we’re trying to do with crop genebanks around the world too.

There’s a botanical garden that is conserving one crop almost single-handedly, but Diane Ragone, who’s in charge of the the National Tropical Botanical Garden and its breadfruit collection, is at a different, and I suspect more entertaining, conference in Trinidad.

LATER: Paul’s vision is more fully set out here.

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Brainfood: Weed collection, Japan vs China wheat, China wheat, Indian maize, Aromatic rice, African cattle, Food system vulnerabilities, SDGs & nutrition, Suitable days, Setaria phenotyping

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Nibbles: Monocultures redux, Seedless watermelons, Red kiwifruit, Herbaria problems, Forest foods, Sorghum beer, SIRGEALC, Chinese veggies, Organic tomatoes, Andean women, Rise origins, Fermentation

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Potato wild relatives: Too much of a good thing?

ResearchBlogging.orgWhat do you call it when you suddenly notice things you didn’t notice that much before, and wrongly assume that their frequency has increased? Is it apophenia? Observational selection bias? I’m sure it’s a thing, though I can’t remember its name. And I’m sure it’s frequency is increasing. Meta-apophenia is rampant, I tell you. Yesterday there was that bunch of papers on plant-pest co-evolution. Today two papers on cytoplasmic diversity in potato. I mean: what are the odds? 1

Anyway. One paper looked at 1,217 European cultivars and breeding clones, 2 the other at 978 accessions, breeding lines and varieties used or released by the breeding programme of the International Potato Centre (CIP). 3 The potato comes in 6 types of maternally-inherited cytoplasmic genomes: M, P, A, W, T and D. The use of the wild species Solanum demissum and S. stoloniferum in parental line and variety development around the world, due to the fact that they have some good pathogen resistance genes, has led to the prevalence of a couple of these. The papers report that 83% and 87% of the CIP and European material respectively had T or D cytoplasm types. In general, the CIP breeding programme was more diverse than the European, but not by all that much. Neither set of authors did the calculation, but the Shannon-Wiener diversity indeces were 0.42 for Europe and 0.58 for CIP, for what that’s worth.

Does it matter? Yes. Quite apart from the disadvantages of the resulting increasing genetic uniformity, these cytoplasm types are concidentally associated with male sterility. That makes them difficult to use in breeding.

…we found that CIP’s breeding germplasm as many others worldwide has experienced a genetic bottleneck in terms of cytoplasmic diversity and continuous incorporation of D- and W/c-type cytoplasms due to the unintended and continuous use of cytoplasmic-based male-sterile maternal lineages in its breeding program. Presumably, CIP breeding activity has already been hindered to a certain extent by sterility problems… CIP functions as a source for distributing breeding germplasm worldwide. Our results show that most of the CIP material distributed to developing countries has T- and D-type cytoplasm. Breeders in developing countries may experience breeding constraints imposed by pollen sterility associated with these cytoplasm types.

So it matters, but there’s a way out.

Nonetheless, male-fertile T-type breeding lines must have contributed to alleviate the problem, thus enabling progress for multiple traits in CIP breeding populations.

And also, D-type germplasm is not all bad. Both it and the M-type were positively correlated with late blight resistance, according to the Europe paper.

So, as ever, swings and roundabouts. Crop wild relatives can be really useful, but you have to careful not to get carried away.