- Antiglycation activity of Vaccinium spp. (Ericaceae) from the Sam Vander Kloet collection for the treatment of type II diabetes. The tropical ones are better. But who is Sam Vander Kloet, I hear you ask?
- Genetic diversity and differentiation of grafted and seed propagated apricot (Prunus armeniaca L.) in the Maghreb region. Well, there really isn’t much.
- Trees and/or networks to display intraspecific DNA sequence variation? And.
- Below-ground plant species richness: new insights from DNA-based methods. Theory says it will be higher than above-ground richness.
- New Insight into the History of Domesticated Apple: Secondary Contribution of the European Wild Apple to the Genome of Cultivated Varieties. No genetic bottleneck, and lots of contribution from local wild relative, making European apples closer to that than to Central Asian ancestor.
- Viability of Oryza sativa L. seeds stored under genebank conditions for up to 30 years. Genebanks work.
- Barrier analysis detected genetic discontinuity among Ethiopian barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) landraces due to landscape and human mobility on gene flow. Barriers to human movement, rather than mere distance, lead to genetic differentiation in barley.
The multifarious history of healthy oats
News of a healthy new oat variety sent me scurrying to the Pedigrees of Oat Lines (POOL) website at Agriculture Canada, but alas BetaGene is not there. However, our source on all things oats tells us of another US cultivar, released some years ago, called HiFi, which is also high in those heart-friendly beta glucans. Our source thinks HiFi was probably involved in developing BetaGene.
HiFi, by the way, includes a whole bunch of wild relatives in its pedigree, including Avena magna, A. longiglumis and A. sterilis. Interestingly, when you check up on that A. magna in GRIN, it turns out that the accession used, which was collected in Khemisset, Morocco in 1964, was originally labelled A. sterilis. It looks as though seeds of a couple of different species were inadvertently placed into a single collecting bag on that far-off summer day in North Africa. The mishap was only recognized when the material was later processed in the USDA genebank, which led to the original sample being divided up. Ah, the perils of crop wild relatives collecting! And ah, the value-adding that genebanks do!
Incidentally, there’s material from at least half a dozen different countries in HiFi’s ((And therefore BetaGene’s?)) pedigree. And that, of course, ((As we may have mentioned before…)) is the standard argument for both genebanks holding diverse collections, and a multilateral system of access to (and sharing of the benefits deriving from the use of) that diversity. Too bad that point is not made in any of the news items about the new variety that have been appearing.
I don’t really understand that. I think “the public” would find it interesting that their porridge, or whatever, includes genetic material from all over the world, and that people have been working very hard for many years to put in place the conditions to allow such sharing to continue. Including an international treaty, no less. Which should really be telling us these stories.
LATER: …as opposed to these.
Nibbles: Banana networking, Belgian flora, On farm breeding course, International collaboration, Wheat pre-breeding, Dog evolution
- ProMusa goes all social.
- Belgian flora goes online.
- Plant breeding goes to the people.
- FAO and ICARDA go together.
- Brits go all in on wheat pre-breeding.
- Modern dog breeds don’t go all the way back to the grey wolf.
Tomato expert’s field notes go online
We have blogged before about the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetic Resources Center at UC Davis and their tomato germplasm database. Now, via Dr Roger Chetelat, the director, we hear of a major addition to the data they make available.
The collecting notes of Dr Charles Rick, the world’s foremost authority on tomato genetics, who passed away in 2002 and after whom the center is named, are now online. You can see an example here, for LA1253, a Lycopersicon hirsutum f. glabratum (or Solanum habrochaites if you prefer) collected in Ecuador in 1970. The notes have been painstakingly transcribed from Dr Rick’s handwritten field notebooks, an example of which you can see below. Cannot have been easy work. And I mean both chasing after all those tomato wild relatives in the first place, and transcribing Dr Rick’s notes after so many years and with him gone.
There are plans to eventually also “scan the pages that contain drawings of fruit shape, maps of collection sites, or other tidbits that can’t readily translated into text.” As an old collector, I find this stuff fascinating. Although I’m really not sure I’d like my own field observations so mercilessly exposed to the world.
Tracking down those sodium exclusion genes in wheat: Part 2
The story thus far: Our plucky heroes have traced Triticum monococcum C68-101, the wild parent of a tetraploid wheat (Line 149) with interesting salinity tolerance genes, to the University of Sydney. Maybe. Kinda. Sort of. But they keep digging, and their perseverance is not long in being rewarded. We hear again from Ray Hare.
You may remember that you asked me back in March to track down the source details of the T. monococcum used as the donor of the sodium exclusion genes Nax1 and 2. At last after some detective work I have a fairly good set of identifiers that match up.
The original seed, that was obtained by the University of Sydney, came as part of a collection of monococcums from Dr Ralph Riley of the Plant Breeding Institute, Cambridge. Prof. Eldrid Baker assembled this collection of Triticum species back in the 1960’s. C68-101 is an accession identifier in the University of Sydney Wheat register with the accession number NS 3637. It is also known as “Triticum aegilopoides – 3″. All of the entries in the University species collection have now been lodged with the Australian Winter Cereals Collection where this monococcum accession has the AUS number 98382.
I have not been able to trace the original collection location. It is likely to be Israel or a neighbouring country. PBI Cambridge had links with the Hebrew University. I have seen no shortage of all manner of Triticum species in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.
I would be fairly confident that other monococcums have these Nax genes. We checked out two others from this set and each one showed Na exclusion activity. We simply had to select one accession to conduct our studies.
As I said before, the A genome diploids remain rather under researched. Who knows what may come from this ploidy level. It is quite possible that few diploids were involved in the original formation of the progenitor tetraploids and some of this A genome variation has been lost in the formation of the hexaploids. The total variation in the A genome in hexaploids is likely to be small when referenced back to that in the monococcums. I have seen good isozyme variation evidence that clearly supports this belief, in the order of a few orders of magnitude.
I am happy to be of additional assistance.