Category: Wild relatives

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More diverse wheats for the future

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Council, one of the UK science-funding agencies, has announced a GBP7 million grant “to increase the diversity of traits available in wheat via a comprehensive pre-breeding programme”. They’re going to be plumbing “ancient sources of wheat germplasm” and creating lines and markers that will allow breeders to breed performance traits into elite lines. All the data and seed lines will be stored centrally and made freely available as part of a coordinated global effort. One of the partners in the project is the University of Nottingham, which issued its own press release, which gives a bit more detail. For example, one of Nottingham’s tasks will be to transfer genetic material from wild relatives of wheat, because “due to modern breeding practises there is not sufficient genetic variation in modern wheat varieties to obtain the increases in yield required”. Another task will be to breed for “Nutrient use efficiency … the amount of grain yield that plants produce for each kilo of nutrient available to the plant”.

Which reminds me, wasn’t it the University of Nottingham’s Professor Donald Grierson who promised, back in the early 1980s, that nitrogen-fixing wheat was just over the horizon? Seems like it still is.

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Botanic gardens get the treatment

We probably don’t give botanic gardens the attention they deserve. So it’s a pleasure to point out that Biodiversity and Conservation has a special issue out on Botanic Gardens in the Age of Climate Change, with a focus on Europe. Lots of interesting stuff in there, including from some old friends.

And since we’re on the subject of published papers, I’d like to say what a good idea it is to include an illustration in the abstract of a paper. I had not come across this before I stumbled on the example here on the left in a recent Scientia Horticulturae paper on Citrus phylogeny.

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The wildness on your sofa

The question of what is the difference between the domestic pig and a wild boar, or the distinction between a broiler chicken and a wild jungle fowl is very similar to the question of what is the difference between a human and a chimpanzee.

Well, maybe. But Evan Ratliff’s piece in National Geographic is an entertaining summary of those distinctions, and of the different possible ways in which they may have come about.

It also reminded me of a great quote from another, much older National Geographic article, which is actually quite relevant again now. 1 Talking about using crop wild relatives, a breeder interviewed by the late Bob Rhoades for The World’s Food Supply at Risk in 1991 says this:

It’s a bit like crossing a house cat with a wildcat. You don’t automatically get a big docile pussycat. What you get is a lot of wildness that you probably don’ t want lying on your sofa.