Wild relatives

November 30, 2011

Frank Bisby

I was very sorry to hear of the death of Frank Bisby of the University of Reading on 25 October. Prof. Bisby was a renowned plant systematist who very early on saw the potential of databases in advancing the taxonomic project, and devoted his career to see that promise fulfilled. He was an ardent conservationist, for example participating in numerous legume genetic resources collecting expeditions. ((Just search on his name.)) He will be much missed.

November 28, 2011November 25, 2011

Brainfood: OSP adoption, Milk quality, Passport data quality, Historical collections, Sweet potato domestication, African veggies, Baobab diversity and domestication, Cassava diversity, Strawberry breeding, Barley GWA, Pest symbionts, Maize diversity and climate change

A large-scale intervention to introduce orange sweet potato in rural Mozambique increases vitamin A intakes among children and women. Just 1 year of training worked just as well as a higher intensity intervention (3 years) in increasing OSP and vitamin A intake by younger children, older children and women, and decreasing prevalence of inadequate vitamin A intakes. OSP represented about half of all sweet potatoes consumed so I guess there was not complete replacement of local varieties.
Composition of milk from minor dairy animals and buffalo breeds: a biodiversity perspective. There are significant interbreed and inter-species differences. Dromedary milk is closest to cow milk, mare and donkey milk maybe the healthiest, but moose milk is the one I’d like to try.
Quality indicators for passport data in ex situ genebanks. That would be the genebanks in Eurisco. Verdict: not bad, but could do better. Most variation in quality is among institutes.
Exploring the population genetics of genebank and historical landrace varieties. Old samples of dead seeds of 4 crops in Swedish museum jars more genetically variable than genebank accessions, but it’s not the genebank’s fault. And at least their seeds are still alive. Also no genetic correspondence between geographically matched museum and genebank samples.
Combining chloroplast and nuclear microsatellites to investigate origin and dispersal of New World sweet potato landraces. Two areas of domestication, probably from a single wild progenitor species: lowland NW South America and lowland Central America/Caribbean. Genetic differences between these 2 genepools not accompanied by morphological differences, but then again nobody’s looked properly, and the current descriptors are useless anyway.
The significance of African vegetables in ensuring food security for South Africa’s rural poor. Their huge potential is being thwarted by evil extensionists. Ok, but don’t we need to move beyond that?
Comparative study on baobab fruit morphological variation between western and south-eastern Africa: opportunities for domestication. Hang on a minute, aren’t there a million factsheets about all this?
Marriage exchanges, seed exchanges, and the dynamics of manioc diversity. Kinship structures determine cassava diversity patterns in Gabon. Matrilineal societies have more diversity.
Interspecific hybridization of diploids and octoploids in strawberry. You get pentaploid and tetraploid plants.
Genome wide association analyses for drought tolerance related traits in barley (Hordeum vulgare L.). Ok, deep breath. Over 200 accessions, both wild and cultivated, from 30 countries, so quite variable, but also structured. There were some QTLs that differed between dry and wet sites, but they didn’t explain much phenotypic variation, and they couldn’t be related to previous work. So GWA not much use, probably because of population structure. But couldn’t that have been predicted? And isn’t it possible to do something about structure in the analysis?
Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Mostly proteobacteria. So my question is, could somehow attacking the symbionts form the basis of a pest management strategy?
Projecting the effects of climate change on the distribution of maize races and their wild relatives in Mexico. Many races and wild relatives are predicted to shift in geographic distribution. Unless of course agronomy intervenes. Teocinte taxa should be collected.

November 28, 2011November 28, 2011

Nibbles: Q&A, Zoopharmacognosy, Pigeonpea genome, Turkey, Wheat relatives

Everyday agriculture mysteries solved.
Other animals self-medicate too.
Dueling pigeonpea genome sequencers? Who knew. Well spotted, James.
I’m thankful for turkeys.
And for the crop wild relatives in ICARDA’s genebank too.

November 25, 2011November 25, 2011

Conservation status of European crop wild relatives assessed

The latest IUCN assessment of the conservation status of European biodiversity is out, and is making the news. The bit on plants is co-authored by Melanie Bilz, Shelagh P. Kell, Nigel Maxted and Richard V. Lansdown and, unsurprisingly perhaps given their track record, includes, I believe for the first time, extensive discussion of crop wild relatives as a distinct class. ((Other classes of plants dealt with in detail are those “listed in European and international policy instruments” and aquatic plants.)) The authors, which coordinated input from dozens of experts, conclude that out of a total of 591 CWR species:

Within the EU 27, at least 10.5% of the CWR species assessed are threatened, of which at least 3.5% are Critically Endangered, 3.3% Endangered and 3.8% Vulnerable – in addition, 4.0% of the species are considered as Near Threatened. One species, Allium jubatum, is Regionally Extinct within Europe and the EU; it is native to Asiatic Turkey and Bulgaria, but has not been found in Bulgaria since its original collection in 1844.

It does not even seem to be available from botanic gardens, according to Botanic Gardens Conservation International’s database. I don’t know what has caused its disappearance in Bulgaria, but currently the main threats to CWRs seem to be intensified livestock farming, tourist development and invasives:

And there are maps ((Which I hope are available in versions one can import into Google Earth, but I haven’t looked into this yet.)) of both the distribution of overall CWR species richness and of the most threatened species:

An extremely useful review is provided of previous work assessing the extent to which CWRs are conserved in genebanks, botanical gardens and protected areas in Europe. But here perhaps I would like to quibble with the authors. Although their listing of existing conservation efforts seems to me thorough and comprehensive, there is no attempt made to synthesize the results of all the different initiatives and come up with a list, however preliminary, of high priority plants for immediate conservation intervention. Surely it would not have been particularly difficult to cross-reference their list of threatened species with listings of accessions in Eurisco and the BGCI database, for example. Maybe this was beyond the scope of this particular exercise and is the focus of parallel work. Perhaps Nigel or Shelagh will respond here.

This is a very important contribution to raising the profile of CWRs within the biodiversity conservation community. Let us hope that it will translate into increased support for their conservation, both ex situ and in situ, along the lines so usefully set out by the authors in their recommendations.

November 24, 2011November 25, 2011

“Super broccoli” from field to fork

The story begins in the Mediterranean in the early 1980s when Professor Richard Mithen, currently at IFR, was on a field trip to collect rare plants as part of his PhD at the University of East Anglia. “We collected wild brassicas in southern Italy and Sicily, and that material was sent into various seed banks in Italy, Sweden and Spain,” says Mithen. “I was able to go on this expedition due to Professor Harold Woolhouse, the then Director of the John Innes Institute, who provided me with a small grant to cover some of my travel costs.”

If you want to read about this collecting trip, you can, thanks to the Collecting Missions Repository: look for CN375. Here’s the material the boys collected which ended up in Spain, according to an “advanced” Eurisco search, as mapped by Genesys:

Where does the story end, you ask? Well, with Beneforté ‘super broccoli’. And a fascinating story it is too. Read for yourself.

LATER: Prof. Mithen informs me the wild species involved was Brassica villosa.