Category: Wild relatives

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Many routes to stayfresh cassava

Luigi wondered whether there was a connection between my recent report of a cassava that did not show post-harvest physiological degradation (PPD, or rotting for the rest of us) and his own post on the same subject in March of this year. So we asked the CIAT blogger.

So what’s the story? Did the high carotene trait come from M. walkerae? Or some other place? It would be great if you could tie these loose ends up for us.

And he did, by asking the CIAT researcher.

There is a connection as Luigi suggests. In the article we have just submitted there are four different sources of tolerance to PPD:

1) High carotenes

2) Induced mutations

3) Tolerance from a wild relative (Manihot walkerae)

4) Waxy starch genotypes.

The tolerance from high carotene clones is not coming from M. walkerae. It is an entirely different source and an entirely new chemical basis for the tolerance as well. As it turns out the tolerance from M. walkerae (which is real and is there) is not as good as the one we have seen in yellow rooted cassava.

Thanks to Neil, and to Hernán, and to Luigi’s elephantine memory. We’ll be on the lookout for that paper.

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Talking about prairie restoration

“Not long ago, it was assumed that once a prairie was plowed up for row crop agriculture, there was no way to get the plant and animal species back again,” said Chris Helzer of The Nature Conservancy. “But now we’ve got the technology and experience to successfully harvest and plant seeds from hundreds of plant species. So in cases where it makes sense to do that kind of restoration, we can re-establish that diverse plant community.”

And that, as we’ve seen, includes a whole bunch of crop wild relatives. Wonder if the folks talking about this in Aurora, NE will give them their due. In fact, I wonder if restoration ecologists in general give any sort of special consideration to CWRs in their work. If you know, tell us.

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Herbaria get it together

Looks like the Paris herbarium (P, to taxonomy geeks), one of the largest in the world at 8,000,000 specimens, is finally sorting itself out. That’s really good news, because Paris is also perhaps the most frustrating herbarium in the world, due to the backlog in processing specimens and the generally sub-par conditions. All that’s going to change.

Once work moving and reclassifying the herbarium is complete, it will also be the world’s largest collection of plant specimens available on the internet. “We shall have 8m images, with a photograph of each plate on the museum’s website,” says the senior curator Jean-Michel Guiraud.

But I was particularly intrigued by this little throwaway final paragraph in the Guardian piece on the catch-up project. ((Maybe someone could explain to me why it was that the Guardian Weekly thought its readers would be interested in a French herbarium. In any case, I for one am really glad it did.))

International collaboration is under way to avoid duplication between the world’s top herbaria: primarily Kew Gardens and the Missouri Botanical Gardens, the two largest alongside Paris, but also smaller collections belonging to natural history museums or botanical gardens in London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Washington and New York.

I need to find out more about what this really means. You certainly don’t want to avoid duplication of specimens entirely, for safety reasons. Maybe it’s more a question of exchanging information on holdings so that at least herbaria know the extent of duplication. Anyway, I want to know how they’ll do it. Because it will be a cold day in genebank database hell before “international collaboration” will be able to “avoid duplication” in the world’s top genebanks.