A recent article in LifeScientist is a fairly conventional look at the eternal struggle for the soul of taxonomy between the morphologists and the gene-jockeys, though admittedly with an Antipodean slant. What makes it particularly interesting for us here is the choice of examples, which include a crop group in Citrus and its allied genera. It seems that molecular work suggests that the ancestors of the Australian genera in the sub-family Aurantoideae may have got there by “trans-oceanic dispersal,” possibly as a result of “cataclysmic events like cyclones.” Which sounds like something I need to find out more about…
Nibbles: Indian potatoes, IUCN report, Climate change and disease
- The history of the potato at Shimla.
- Lots of Mediterranean mammals in trouble, including wild relatives of domesticated species.
- SciDev rounds up the science on climate change and diseases. Human diseases, that is, but much also applies to those of crops and livestock.
Nibbles: Goats in Europe, Horse domestication, Food map, IITA training, Asian collaboration, Tom Wagner, Tomatoes
- First Law of Geography valid after all.
- Multiple domestication of the horse in China.
- The Atlantic has a weird food map. What does it mean? Answers on a postcard, please.
- IITA tells farmers about its core collections, among other things.
- Bhutan and Thailand collaborate on agrobiodiversity conservation.
- Details of Tom Wagner’s European Tour. He’s the amateur breeders’ breeder.
- Tomatoes thrive on urine diet. Not a piss-take.
Nibbles: Chicory symbolism, Watermelon disease, Olive documentation, Camassia quamash, Pig maps
- Chicory averts evil. Gotta get me some.
- Genebank watermelon material reveals sources of resistance to WVD caused by SqVYV. What?
- Israelis, Palestinians and Germans collaborate on DNA fingerprinting and quality evaluation of olive trees. Wait, what? Scroll down.
- Genetic structure of Native American food plant not really affected by Native Americans. This is the bulb that kept Lewis & Clark alive, apparently.
- Tracing Paper compares hog distribution in 1922 and now, finds little difference.
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.