Category: Wild relatives

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Bringing back the aurochs

From our occasional contributor Michael Kubisch.

Anyone who has seen Jurassic Park (and who hasn’t) will understand how this film has stirred the imagination by suggesting the possibility of bringing back species that have long gone extinct. Add to that the recent breakthroughs in our ability to retrieve and decipher genomes obtained from tissues of animals that have perished thousands of years ago and you can understand the excitement. Italian scientists now claim to have a rough draft of the genome of the aurochs, a wild bovid that roamed Europe until perhaps as late as the 17th century and which is depicted so beautifully in the cave paintings in Lascaux. With the genome map as a compass the Italians are convinced that they can now breed back the aurochs using contemporary cattle breeds as a starting point.

Such attempts are, of course, not new and there are bovids around that are thought to resemble the aurochs. But in the past such efforts were always fraught with a fair degree of uncertainty because they relied entirely on phenotypic information gleaned from drawings or written descriptions. Having actual genetic information of the aurochs takes that uncertainty out of the equation. Whether the Italians’ efforts will be more successful is hard to predict because they are based on the assumption that all of the genetic information of the aurochs can still be found somewhere in modern cattle. And it is far from clear whether that is the case. But even if it isn’t, having the aurochs genome at hand, it may one day be possible to make the necessary genetic changes to transform a modern cattle embryo into an aurochs embryo and have that embryo then carried to term in a modern cow. And if you can bring back the aurochs, it may quite well be possible to bring back animal breeds that have similarly vanished. Still sounds a bit like science fiction? Perhaps, but nobody ever thought you could clone a sheep.

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Book on gene flow published

I’ve just received a copy of “Gene Flow Between Crops and Their Wild Relatives” by Meike S. Andersson and M. Carmen de Vicente (Johns Hopkins). This will no doubt become the go-to reference book on the subject. There are chapters on all the major crops, with what look to me like very comprehensive bibliographies on each. Of particular interest are the maps of introgression risk at the end of the book. These will apparently be made available on the Bioversity website in due course. But here’s one (barley) in the meantime to whet your appetite.

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Nibbles: Indian buffalo, Indian local crops, CBD, AgricultureBridge, Kew, Geo-referencing, Cyprus, China and climate change, CC icons, Chinese AnGR, FAO information, Rose symbolism, Pacific ethnobotany, Grape history and genetics, Taraxacum

Hold on to your hats, this will make up for lost time. Hope you all had a nice break, Happy New Year!

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Plant exploration is not dead

Not that we ever thought it was, but there are souls out there who seem to think that we already have in hand all the agricultural biodiversity we’ll ever need, so there’s no need to hunt for more or bring it back alive. The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service yesterday announced its seed-hunting plans for 2010.

[W]alnuts from Kyrgyzstan, grasses from Russia, and carrots and sunflowers from fields across the Southeastern United States.

These are just some of roughly 15 expeditions that the USDA sends out each year to look for potentially useful crops and their wild relatives. There’s more in a longer article.

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Eating grass seeds is much older than we thought

ResearchBlogging.org An astonishing paper has just been published in Science. Under the title Mozambican Grass Seed Consumption During the Middle Stone Age, 1 Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, informs us that:

A large assemblage of starch granules has been retrieved from the surfaces of Middle Stone Age tools from Mozambique, showing that early Homo sapiens relied on grass seeds starting at least 105,000 years ago, including those of sorghum grasses.

From a broad selection of stone tools, Mercader retrieved 2369 starch granules, 2112 (89%) of which were from a Sorghum species. There were granules from other edible species too, including beans, mallows, and even the African false banana Ensete ventricosum and the African wild potato Hypoxis hemerocallidea. He also found some evidence that granules had been altered in ways suggestive of “culinary-induced modifications” but conclusive proof that the people were cooking the foods they gathered will require a different kind of research.

The standard litany for the diet of early people is that

“[s]eed collecting is conventionally perceived to have been an irrelevant activity among the Pleistocene foragers of southern Africa, on the grounds of both technological difficulty in the processing of grains and the belief that roots, fruits, and nuts, not cereals, were the basis for subsistence for the past 100,000 years and further back in time”.

Mercader concludes from his data

“that early Homo sapiens from southern Africa consumed not just underground plant staples but above-ground resources too”.

I’ll wait to see what people better versed in archaeological methods have to say about the paper. For now, I’m too gobsmacked to think of anything except to wonder whether they were cultivating those grasses as well as harvesting them.