Category: Wild relatives

Posted on

Nibbles: Cancun, Maya in Haiti, Indian Food, Pavlovsk, Currywurst, Banana biofuel, Book, Radio, Beer, East African cattle breed, Climate change and altitude, Amazon, Lycopersicon, Pollinator plants, Phenology, Economics

Posted on

Nibbles: Kew, Diversity, Allanblackia and Acacia, Pulses, GIS, Poverty, Early morning flowering, Agrobiodiversity and climate change, Breeding, Genebanks, Perenniality, Blogs, AGRA, Potato diversity, Witchweed, Mexican potatoes, Salvia, Old Sicilian chestnut, Tropical maize

  • Guardian has whole piece on the importance on Kew’s collections without once mentioning Millennium Seed Bank. Anyway, the Paris herbarium is not so bad either, though they are no match for the Kew press machine.
  • Hybridization is good for plant diversity. Well, yeah. What am I missing here? Oh and here’s more about things that maintain variation, and more still. You see what I did there?
  • Allanblackia is the next big thing in agroforestry. Which probably means its name will soon be changed.
  • Conclave meets to discuss election of next Pope pulse productivity.
  • Videos from Africa GIS week.
  • Meeting to review 10 years of research on chronic poverty. Must have been deeply depressing.
  • Helping rice to keep its cool. A crop wild relatives story.
  • “The Ministry of Science and Technology should emphasize the need to undertake research programmes on unexplored and underutilized crops as these could constitute the genetic base for genes for improved nutritional quality of foods.” In India, that is.
  • “We need to mine that diversity to provide genetic material in an adapted background more readily to be used by plant breeders.” From CIMMYT. How many times have I heard that? Here’s my problem: who will do it?
  • That IRIN feature from a few days ago recycled with a new pic. Which is of a genebank not included in the list in the text. The person shown is my friend Dr Jean Hanson, recently retired head of the ILRI genebank.
  • DIY perennial cereals.
  • “Biodiversity scientists and agricultural scientists have tended to approach their interests in very different ways. I think there’s a lot we can learn from each other.” Wait, what?
  • Another best biodiversity blogs list. Ahem.
  • A “very clear action plan” for a ‘Green Revolution’ in Africa emerges from AGRA meeting. You will however look in vain for the details on the scidev.net piece.
  • The last Inka treasure. Yep, the potato.
  • Boffins find anti-Striga gene. No, not really, settle down.
  • Rachel Laudan is really rude about Mexican potatoes.
  • Cur moriatur homo cui salvia crescit in horto? Good question.
  • Finding the 100-Horse Chestnut.
  • Getting to grips with photoperiod sensitivity in maize.
Posted on

Considering crop wild relatives anew

Our friend Andy Jarvis is suffering the pains of the Villa Bellagio on scuzzy Lake Como as his contribution to a rethinking of the role of crop wild relatives in adapting to climate change. You can read his impressions (and see the presentation he unleashed on an unsuspecting audience) at his team’s blog.

Bottom lines:

  • Crop wild relatives are increasingly important.
  • Crop wild relatives are increasingly usable, and hence increasingly in demand.
  • Crop wild relatives are increasingly threatened.
Posted on

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s Super Rice.

Cutting through the hype, there may be some substance in the announcement by the University of Arizona that it is leading a team funded to the tune of USD 9.9 million “to develop ‘super rice’“. ((Come to think of super-rice would be cheap at that price.)) The plan is to understand the genomes of all 24 rice species, the better to breed the two species — Oryza sativa and O. glaberrima — that yield the rice crop.

The announcement contains a lot of information about how this effort will help researchers to understand the evolutionary history and current functioning of rice. But there’s also a food security angle, natch.

“During the domestication process, people end up selecting a couple of plants and crossing them,” [said University of Arizona plant scientist Rod] Wing. “This way, one of them became the founder of all the domesticated plants. That variety was then improved over thousands of years, but it contains only a very small variety of genes that could be used for crop improvement.” … This so-called domestication bottleneck leads to crop plants with highly desirable traits such as high yield but deficiencies in other areas such as compromised ability to fight off diseases or cope with droughts.

I expect the researchers might be wondering whether they can duplicate the domestication events that resulted in modern rice, as wheat researchers did in constructing synthetic bread wheats, injecting a whole lot more agricultural biodiversity into the crop.

And here’s a cool idea; spend some of the loot on public awareness:

As an outreach component, the project will include a biannual Plant Science Family Night program at Ventana Vista Elementary School in Tucson, targeting K-5 students and families, with the goal of getting children and their families in the greater Tucson area excited about plants and the role plant science plays in ensuring a safe, sustainable and secure food supply for our planet.

Shouldn’t every big grant do something similar?