- Analysis of threats to South American flora and its implications for conservation. Bottom line: Ecuadorian and Colombian Andes, southern Paraguay, the Guyana shield, southern Brazil, and Bolivia. But don’t let that divert your attention from the cool maps.
- Management increases genetic diversity of honey bees via admixture. No genetic bottleneck there. And the same in more words, but not as many as the original paper.
- Phylogeography of Asian wild rice, Oryza rufipogon: a genome-wide view. When in doubt, throw more markers at it. Two groups in O. rufipogon, only the Chinese/Indochinese one related to cultivated rice (indica). Japonica out on a limb. And the longer version.
- Legume Diversity Patterns in West Central Africa: Influence of Species Biology on Distribution Models. Temperature variables are most important.
- Multiple domestications of the Mesoamerican gene pool of lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus L.): evidence from chloroplast DNA sequences. Andean and Mesoamerican cultivated genepools confirmed, and two sub-genepools within the latter, one originating in western central Mexico and the other between Guatemala and Costa Rica. Will they mash up with the study in the first link? Some of the people involved are neighbours and friends.
A couple of CWRs on the brink
The Top 100 Threatened Species list just released by IUCN, including in a nifty online booklet with nice photos, includes two crop wild relatives: Dioscorea strydomiana from South Africa and Lathyrus belinensis from Turkey. The yam is down to 250 plants and is threatened by harvesting, the vetch down to 1,000, with building work encroaching the population. But in both cases, there is seed conserved ex situ. Surely there are some CWRs that are more threatened than that? Maybe even some wild tomatoes.
Will Ecuador benefit from wild tomato genes?
A tweet alerted me to a story about the value of genes in crop wild relatives.
The source headline is “Galapagos tomato provides key to making cultivated tomatoes resistant to whitefly,” and though it reads like a press release ((As, indeed, I would expect it to, given that the source is one of these echoing link farms.)) I have so far been unable to run down the original. I did, however, locate the event of note.
By now, Syarifin Firdaus should have successfully defended his graduate thesis on Whitefly Resistance In Tomato and Hot Pepper, which was due to take place today and which I imagine created all the interest.
My interest stemmed from the Twitterer’s question: “Will Ecuador benefit?”
The blurb for Firdaus’ talk makes it clear that after sampling almost 100 genebank accessions, wild Solanum galapagense had the strongest resistance and this seemed to be down to a single gene on chromosome 2. But it also pointed out that resistance was found in two other wild Solanum species, and in several Capsicums.
With these results, introduction of the resistance into modern tomato varieties is feasible and within a few years the first commercial, resistant tomato cultivars are expected on the market.
And that is a good thing not so much because whitefly damage the crop, but because they transmit virus diseases that are really harmful.
The release, which lists all the private sector companies involved in the research, strongly suggests that it will be genes from S. galapagense that will be bred into commercial varieties “within two years”. It also says that “resistance was also found in China, Indonesia and Thailand,” presumably in local tomato varieties rather than wild relatives.
Will Ecuador benefit? I seriously doubt it. Other wild relatives from Ecuador (and elsewhere) have already donated genes worth millions of dollars to the tomato industry, and no precedent has been set.
Should Ecuador benefit? Hard to see why. It isn’t as if S. galapagense (which until relatively recently was treated as a form of S. cheesmaniae, a well-established source of good tomato genes) has been maintained by farmers since time immemorial.
Best yet, tomato isn’t even listed on Annex 1 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Solanum section tuberosa, sure; Solanum melongena, you bet. But Solanum lycopersicum and its wild relatives, outta luck.
Of course, the genetic resource in question might just be covered by the Convention on Biological Diversity, which offers Ecuador and its supporters a glimmer of hope, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
What I really want to know is why S. galapagense is resistant? What are the insect pests on the Galapagos that exerted such strong selection pressure? Perhaps @WayOfThePanda can find out.
IUCN and Microsoft map threats to biodiversity
“We’re building an application that allows people to map those threats spatially,” Joppa explains. “We’re trying to provide a repository of evidence for threats to species.”
Lucas Joppa is talking about a collaboration between Microsoft and IUCN to map threats to biodiversity. Worth keeping an eye on. But I wonder if they’ll consider agrobiodiversity too. If so, we have some ideas here at the blog. Anyway, presumably the thing will link up with GeoCAT in some clever way.
LATER: And also link to this? Or at least suck in the data?
Brainfood: Wild soybean, Leafy vegetables collection gaps, Banana drought tolerance screening, Chinese soybean breeding, Malagasy coffee collections, Bacteria on beans
- Perennial Glycine: A new source of genetic diversity for soybean improvement. The perennial wild species are genetically and geographically distant from the crop, but at least one can be crossed, with some difficulty, and some potentially useful genes have been enticed to make their way into the cultivated genome. To no great effect, but it’s early days yet.
- Genetic resources collections of leafy vegetables (lettuce, spinach, chicory, artichoke, asparagus, lamb’s lettuce, rhubarb and rocket salad): composition and gaps. You can just read the collecting priorities for each genepool, or analyze the data yourself.
- Screening the banana biodiversity for drought tolerance: can an in vitro growth model and proteomics be used as a tool to discover tolerant varieties and understand homeostasis? Maybe.
- Development of yield and some photosynthetic characteristics during 82 years of genetic improvement of soybean genotypes in northeast China. Yield doubled, but at the cost of water use efficiency. Maybe those perennials could help?
- An assessment of the genetic integrity of ex situ germplasm collections of three endangered species of Coffea from Madagascar: implications for the management of field germplasm collections. For 3 wild species, there’s lots of genetic diversity in field genebanks, but also lots of crossing with other species.
- Diversity of culturable bacteria and occurrence of phytopathogenic species in bean seeds (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) preserved in a germplasm bank. “…the fact that potentially phytopathogenic bacteria have been preserved in a genebank should emphasize the importance of rigorous sanitary controls for plant genetic resources.” You think?