- Genetic Resources of Cannabis sativa L. in the Collection of the Gene Bank at INF&MP in Poznan. I’d pay money to see this in the field at evaluation time.
- Specific median flour particle size distribution of Japanese common wheats; Comparison with Chinese common wheats. Japanese diversity is a small fraction of Chinese diversity. Also, can you really have semicolons in titles?
- Association and Validation of Yield-Favored Alleles in Chinese Cultivars of Common Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). And among Chinese wheats, the modern cultivars are a small subset of the diversity in the mini core collection.
- Diversity among maize landraces in North West Himalayan region of India assessed by agro-morphological and quality traits. I like it when specific accessions are highlighted as being special in some way. But will breeders around the world have access to them?
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure in Aromatic and Quality Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Landraces from North-Eastern India. More than just basmati. But will breeders around the world have access to them?
- African Indigenous Cattle: Unique Genetic Resources in a Rapidly Changing World. At least 150 breeds, many endangered, all important.
- Sustainable Sourcing of Global Agricultural Raw Materials: Assessing Gaps in Key Impact and Vulnerability Issues and Indicators. We don’t know the vulnerabilities well enough.
- Can the sustainable development goals reduce the burden of nutrition-related non-communicable diseases without truly addressing major food system reforms? No.
- Suitable Days for Plant Growth Disappear under Projected Climate Change: Potential Human and Biotic Vulnerability. Tropical areas are screwed.
- A versatile phenotyping system and analytics platform reveals diverse temporal responses to water availability in Setaria. Fancy equipment picks out differences among genotypes.
Nibbles: Monocultures redux, Seedless watermelons, Red kiwifruit, Herbaria problems, Forest foods, Sorghum beer, SIRGEALC, Chinese veggies, Organic tomatoes, Andean women, Rise origins, Fermentation
- Deploy your cover crop diversity in time rather than space. But deploy it.
- Triploid goodness.
- Searching for a red kiwi.
- Herbaria on the rack.
- Let them eat non-timber forest products.
- Sorghum spurts in Kenya. Because beer.
- Sign up for SIRGEALC 10.
- Knowing your 菠菜 from your 西洋菜.
- 400 tomato varieties. No pesticides. No water. No problem.
- Women are conserving Andean crops. Sure, though with some occasional help from genebanks.
- The Rice Origins Wars continue.
- Sauerkraut changed the world.
Potato wild relatives: Too much of a good thing?
What 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.
Of plants and their pests
For whatever reason, there was a spate of papers on the coevolution of plants and their pests last week. Or at least I got to hear about them last week.
The one that got the most attention by the popular press — well, actually, the only one that got any attention by the popular press — was a study comparing changes in glucosinolates in the brassica family with speciation in the Pieridae butterflies, whose caterpillars feed on these plants. Glucosinolates give wasabi and mustard their zing (hence the press interest), but are deadly to insects, which is why they evolved in the first place. Each major innovation in the chemistry of glucosinolates since they first arose in the brassicas at the K-T boundary is correlated, the authors found, with a burst of diversification in detoxification mechanisms among the insects at which they were aimed.
The other two studies don’t delve quite so deeply back into evolutionary time, focusing on the role of domestication. The first looked at populations of the green peach aphid (Myzus persicae) growing on a diversity of both crops and their wild relatives. The authors found that aphid populations on domesticated species were more genetically diverse, but evolved more slowly, because selection was less strong and populations larger, weakening the effect of genetic drift. Applying this result to the brassica-butterfly model would suggest that the strength of the association between glucosinolate and butterfly diversity should decrease for the domesticated brassicas compared to the wild ones, but I’m not sure this was looked at in that study.
The third paper investigated the apple’s fungal pathogen Venturia inaequalis. The dispersal characteristics of dozens of strains collected on both domesticated and wild apples in Kazakhstan were compared. The authors found that apple domestication has led to enhanced colonization capacity by the pathogen: strains from orchards have more, bigger spores. Seems to me that’s somewhat contradictory to the aphid example.
The relationship between plants and their pests is, well, complicated.
Nibbles: Organic research, Plant models, Tabasco peppers, Andean shepherds, Weird pigs, Wild rice harvesting, Heritage ducks, Nutrient content
- An investment in organic research. At last.
- Plant models go online. Not those kinds of models.
- Where the peppers for Tabasco sauce come from.
- Apparently, “[w]hite alpacas have been overbred.” But not that kind of breeding, I think.
- Pigs are weird.
- Learn how to make poles. Yes, those kinds of poles.
- Even ducks can be heritage.
- Higher carbon dioxide bad for nutrition.