Category: Wild relatives

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Seed sleuth

There’s a glowing portrait of Ken Street, a plant hunter, in the Sydney Morning Herald. Street works with ICARDA, the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, based in Aleppo, Syria and spends much his time in the wilds of central Asia, searching out crop diversity. The piece is a bit gushy for my taste, and I’m not sure I agree with everything Street is quoted as saying. “We have been eating genetically modified organisms for 10,000 years” turns the phrase “genetically modified organisms” into meaningless guff. But he does make some good points about the amount of diversity that survives — for now — in places like Armenia and Tajikistan. If you want a glimpse into the life of a man they call “an agricultural Indiana Jones,” that’s what you’ll get.

Luigi unavailable for comment.

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The benefits of sharing

A post in Google Earth Blog alerted me to the great efforts by staff and students at the Faculty of Agronomy and Forest Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile to geo-tag the specimens in their herbarium. They’ve produced a Google Earth kml file to show hundreds of collecting locations throughout the country. Below are the localities of Persea lingue, a congener of the avocado, though I’m not sure how closely related they are. It’s threatened, according to IUCN, and indeed there’s only a couple of specimens in the herbarium, quite near each other:

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Watermelon: Out of Africa

Summer here in Rome tastes of watermelon. So, as the temperature outside hit the upper 30s today, it was great to sit in air-conditioned splendour in the office this lunchtime, eat a slice of cocomero and read a paper on the origin of the crop in the latest GRACE, which has just come out. Fenny Dane and Jiarong Liu at Auburn have looked in detail at chloroplast DNA from material collected all over Africa in an effort to reconstruct the history of both the familiar fruit (Citrullus lanatus var. lanatus) and the related tsanna or citron melon, which is a different botanical variety (var. citroides) of the same species. It turns out that the split of var. lanatus and var. citroides from a common ancestor (C. ecirrhosus, maybe) is ancient. The citron melon split off independently in the area of Swaziland and South Africa, while the wild precursor of the cultivated watermelon has its roots, as it were, on the other side of the continent, in Namibia. The picture below (courtesy of GBIF) shows why watermelon does ok in the Italian summer heat. Its natural habitat is pretty much desert (the record is for an accession in the US National Plant Germplasm System).

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