- Nagib Nassar challenges the wisdom of GM cassava. Cultivate indigenous and wild varieties of the crop!
- Or fonio (Digitaria exilis). New paper on its diversity.
- And for dessert? Wild apple diversity?
- Need salad? How about Salicornia then?
- Nice aurochs steak to go with the salad?
- Not too soon to start planning a future harvest, if you’re in Ireland and want seeds.
Locating agricultural origins in Mexico and Italy
I know that domestication is not an event, but a process. I know that most crops and livestock were probably domesticated more than once, in more than one area. I know all this, but I’m still a sucker for papers that come up with specific times and places for the origin of agriculture. Papers such as Daniel Zizumbo-Villarreal and Patricia Colunga-GarcíaMarín‘s in the latest GRACE:
Sympatric distribution of the putative wild ancestral populations of maize, beans and squash indicate the extreme northwest Balsas-Jalisco region as a possible locus of domestication.
The paper is a review. It synthesizes a host of paleoecological, archaeobotanical and molecular data. Meanwhile, another paper, this time in the Journal of Archaeological Science, applies matrix mathematics to a somewhat different, though related, problem: the arrival of wheat in Italy. The authors looked at a selection of old emmer landraces from all around Italy stored in the German and ICARDA genebanks. ((The question of why they did not obtain material from an Italian genebank is one that I am loath to explore, for fear of what I might find.)) They developed a matrix of genetic distances among these based on microsatellite data. They then calculated matrices of geographical distances among the landraces based on different putative places of arrival of the crop around the coast of Italy. The two matrices showed the closest correlations for arrival sites located in northern Puglia, the heel of Italy. That corresponds with where the earliest Neolithic sites are found.
Now, I wonder, when will someone apply this method to maize, beans and squash molecular data and test mathematically Zizumbo-Villarreal and Colunga-GarcíaMarín more “qualitative” inferences?
Review calls for support of Kew genebank
The independent review of Kew Gardens commissioned by Defra is just out. It has some very nice things to say about the Millennium Seed Bank, and quite rightly so.
The work of the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) is particularly impressive, and the MSB has forged partnerships with more than 120 institutions in 54 countries. Kew has advised many of these partners on how to set up and run seed banks for themselves. This has included, for example, the delivery of germination protocols to a network of 38 national seed banks in sub-Saharan Africa; and the use of seeds from 500 species stored in the MSB for restoration and species recovery programmes worldwide.
Which leads to a recommendation that Defra should pull out its wallet.
The MSB’s operating costs over the past nine years have averaged £4.1 million per annum. They were funded until the end of 2009 by the Millennium Commission. The external funding stream that has been going to the MSB to assist in the running costs ceased from January 2010 and Kew will now either have to fund the MSB from its own resources; seek alternative sources of funding, particularly by building the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership; or downsize or even close the MSB. For the reasons set out in Chapter 2, the review team believes the MSB should be of very high priority for Kew, and it recommends that Kew should be given additional interim funding by Defra, which tapers down over three years, to enable Kew to gather the additional funding support that it needs. We recommend that £3 million be given for this purpose in 2010/11 and £1.5 million in 2011/12.
This is not a particularly good time to make a call on the public finances in Britain, but surely the Millennium Seed Bank is too big — and important — to fail. Defra will no doubt find the money. And so they should.
Nibbles: EoL, Mixed farming, Conservation medicine, Indicators, Vitamin A, Hamburger, Rewilding, Tejate
- Did you know the Encyclopedia of Life does crop wild relatives?
- Smallholders with mixed crop and livestock systems are the key to it all. My mother-in-law says: I agree.
- Deforestation is bad for the health.
- 2010 Biodiversity Indicator Partnership launches National Biodiversity Indicators Portal.
- Aussies trial a new, secret orange spud. Yeah I can really see that being a huge success.
- The McItaly kerfuffle rumbles on. Much like your stomach after you’ve eaten one.
- The “rewilding” kerfuffle rumbles on. Much like those herds of wildebeest roaming majestically across the Great Plains.
- Rewilding an ancient pre-Hispanic drink. Ooops, I guess that should be reviving.
The role of ex situ crop diversity conservation in adaptation to climate change
Department of Very Cool: Luigi’s presentation on The role of ex situ crop diversity conservation in adaptation to climate change was featured on the home page of SlideShare today.
The role of ex situ crop diversity conservation in adaptation to climate change
View more presentations from Luigi Guarino.
Course, it might be gone by tomorrow, so you’ll just have to trust me on this. At this very moment 65 people have seen it. Go, watch, boost his figures. Congratulations to Luigi.