A paper in Conservation Genetics identifies (not, I think, for the first time) the Caucasus as the centre of diversity and origin of wild grapevine, at least based on microsatellites. A genetic refugium was detected in Sardinia, and it would be interesting to know whether the plastid lineage that is fixed there is responsible for the high levels of procyanidins in some local wines.
Wet Wet Wet
The GlobWetland project uses remote sensing and GIS to address the threats faced by the world’s wetlands. Do we know how many crop wild relatives are found in wetlands? Or even how threats to wetlands affect genetic diversity in adjacent agricultural areas? I think plant genetic resources people and the ecosystem conservation crowd need to link up a bit more, and I can’t help thinking that wetlands might be pretty good meeting ground.
Fried purple tomatoes?
Would you eat a purple pizza? Breeders at Oregon State University are hoping you would, because they’re a couple of years away from releasing a purple tomato hybrid, the colour apparently coming from a wild relative. Read about it here. Supposed to be better for you too…
Domestication my ass
Why was the Somali wild ass domesticated and not, say, the zebra? It’s a cantankerous animal at best. Washington University archaeologist Fiona Marshall is travelling the world looking at bones and wild populations, but she is also studying the behaviour of the St Louis Zoo’s five wild asses with Zoo researcher Cheryl Asa to seek “clues as to how they were turned into donkeys,” according to this article.
Transposuns
EurekAlert summarizes work by Mark Ungerer and his colleagues at Kansas State University which is set to appear in the 24 October issue of Current Biology. They
determined that the genome size differences between … hybrid and parental sunflower species are associated with a massive proliferation of transposable genetic elements that has occurred independently in the genome of each hybrid species.
This is interesting because each of the three hybrid species studied has evolved under strong abiotic stress (in deserts, salt marshes). It has been suggested that both hybridization and abiotic stress can activate and lead to the multiplication of transposable elements, making this a potentially very valuable model system.