Category: Wild relatives

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Bottlegourd to the rescue

Zucchini yellow mosaic virus (ZYMV) does not, alas, restrict itself to zucchini, or even courgettes. It attacks most cucurbits, including cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, squash, bottlegourds and watermelons. One of those, however, the bottlegourd Lagenaria siceraria may also hold the antidote to ZYMV. Scientists at the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA grew seeds of 190 different accessions from a USDA genebank and inoculated the seedlings with virus.

To their surprise, 36 accessions of the 190 screened—33 from India alone—were completely resistant to ZYMV infection, and another 64 accessions were partially resistant. They also found that ZYMV resistance is heritable in crosses between different bottlegourd accessions, enabling the development of bottlegourd varieties with enhanced virus resistance.

Breeding resistance from Lagenaria into other cucurbits may be difficult, although if they can isolate the gene(s) responsible other options become possible. And even they may not be needed. Growers can graft watermelons, for example, onto bottlegourd rootstocks and benefit from the resistance that way.

Wl020 p.s. I shouldn’t get snitty, of course, but Wikipedia’s entry on bottlegourd in China is bizarre in the extreme. I’m not going to wonder what a “remedy for health” is, though it sounds to me a lot like a disease. I am going to wonder why there is absolutely no mention of the presence absolutely everywhere of a jillion small bottlegourds as good luck charms. The Buddha used one to carry “life’s essentials”.

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Conserving crop wild relatives

A paper just out in Biological Conservation discusses crop wild relatives (CWR) in the UK. ((Creation and use of a national inventory of crop wild relatives. Biological Conservation. In Press, Corrected Proof. Available online 27 September 2007. Nigel Maxted, Maria Scholten, Rosalind Codd and Brian Ford-Lloyd.)) The authors include some of the same British boffins who wrote a global survey of CWR conservation. The paper describes how to develop a comprehensive national plan for the conservation of CWR, using the UK as an example. Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall, but I’ll summarize the main points.

First, of course, you need to know what you’re dealing with. A UK national inventory of CWR was developed as part of the EU-funded PGR Forum project. It contains 15 families, 413 genera, 1955 species (44 endemic) — that’s 65% of the native flora. So then you have to prioritize. For example, 13 of the UK’s CWR species are considered threatened according to IUCN criteria and one is apparently extinct in the wild ( the grass Bromus interruptus). The authors ran an iterative algorithm on the distribution data for about 250 CWR species ((Chosen because of their potential economic value and perceived threat level.)) to identify the smallest number of areas which would contain the largest number of species. Seventeen 10×10 km grid squares were selected within which could be found two thirds of the priority CWR species.

To what extent are these “hotspots” already protected? Interestingly, none of them “did not overlap with existing UK protected areas.” What’s now needed is to confirm the presence of the target species in the protected areas and come up with management plans specifically aimed at the CWR.

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International meet on agrobiodiversity

UC Davis is organizing a follow-up to the international symposium held in Aleppo, Syria in 1997 under the name of “The Origins of Agriculture and the Domestication of Crop Plants in the Near East.” Also dedicated to Jack R. Harlan (1917–1998), celebrated agricultural botanist and plant explorer, the 2008 conference is entitled “Biodiversity in Agriculture: Domestication, Evolution, & Sustainability.” If you’re planning to go, how about reporting on the conference for our readers at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog?

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DNA barcoding takes off

DNA barcoding is based on a gamble (or maybe a shrewd guess), and perhaps a smidgin of circular thinking: that there is a chunk of genome short enough to sequence quickly and cheaply, and which shows just enough variability for the entire sequence to be the same for all members of a species, but different for different species. Well, the gamble seems to have paid off. A suitable bit of a gene has duly been identified for both animals and plants, data are being ammassed, and there’s talk of a portable gadget being available in a few years which will read off the relevant sequence from a bit of leaf or skin or something and compare it with a database to give you the species name right there in the field.

Continue reading “DNA barcoding takes off”

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Jack Hawkes: Obituary

It has been a bit of a wait, but worth it. London’s Daily telegraph carries a fine obituary of Jack Hawkes, who died a couple of weeks ago.

Hawkes recalled that Vavilov treated him “as an equal even though I was without a paper to my name. He inspired me with his extensive knowledge, friendship and boundless enthusiasm.” Tragically, Vavilov was to be executed on trumped-up charges in 1943 after falling foul of Trofim Lysenko, his successor as president of the Lenin Academy, a man whom Hawkes found to be “a dangerous, bigoted and wholly repellent person — a politician rather than a scientist, very able to ingratiate himself with Communist Moscow”.

And there you have, in a nutshell, much of the early history of plant genetic resources.

Hawkes met Vavilov just before setting out on the British Empire Potato Collecting Expedition to South America, covering 9000 miles and collecting more than 1100 acessions. The Indiana Jones meta-narrative lives on, of course, precisely because of men like Vavilov and Hawkes who made it their business to go out there and find the treasure. To their eternal credit, they shared the loot with all who asked.