Category: Wild relatives

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A prickly question

Carciofi

Dealing with a Carciofo alla Giudea I seldom wrestle also with the more fundamental existential question of what exactly an artichoke is. A flower, of course, although for the most part one is eating bracts and the receptacle. A thistle, too. But beyond that, I have to confess I have never really considered relationships among the various varieties of artichoke nor between the artichoke and its obvious cousin the cardoon (where one eats the blanched petiole, preferably in a tasty bechamel sauce).

Real taxonomists, of course, consider this sort of question all the time. And by and large they have concluded that in the genus Cynara the cultivated artichoke is C. scolymus, with cardoon — wild and cultivated — in a separate species, C. cardunculus. Then again, maybe they all belong to C. cardunculus. And how did they evolve? As crops, artichoke and cardoon are pretty recent, only a couple of thousand years old at most. Which wild species were they selected from?

I need concern myself with these prickly issues no more. A recent paper ((G. Sonnante et al. (2007) On the origin of artichoke and cardoon from the Cynara gene pool as revealed by rDNA sequence variation. Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 54: 483-495. DOI – 10.1007/s10722-006-9199-9)) from the Institute of Plant Genetics in Bari is clear: artichokes and wild and cultivated cardoons belong to a single species, C. cardunculus. How exactly they evolved is less clear. Cardoon and artichoke were domesticated separately and independently, the artichoke around 2000 years ago and the cardoon 1000 years later “at the beginning of the second millennium AD”. Where all this happened is still mysterious. Artichoke’s origins are probably to the east, while the cardoon was domesticated in northern italy, southern France and Spain. But some of the wild “cardoons” of Spain, which differ considerably from those in the eastern Mediterranean, might be feral artichokes.

All of which is delicious. But beyond knowing more about artichoke and cardoon, these findings should also feed into the rational conservation of the species’ biodiversity, being undertaken thanks to a euros 4 million project in Italy ((For which we thank the photograph above.)).

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Welsh pony in trouble?

A long article in icWales, the self-described “national website of Wales,” details the predicament of the local pony breed. Once an important part of everyday rural life – and indeed industrial life, due to their use in coal mines – more recently a children’s trekking pony, there is now limited demand for the breed. Wild herds have thus declined dramatically, no doubt resulting in genetic erosion. Does it matter? A resounding yes echoes around the hills.

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Chinese fungi and tea

I’m killing a few hours at Hong Kong International Airport, so I pick up the latest issue of China Today. There’s a number of really interesting articles, but two little snippets jumped out at me. The first is a short note on the Chinese Caterpillar Fungus, Cordyceps sinensis. No, I’d never heard of it either, but it turns out that it is important in Chinese traditional medicine, and that it has not been possible to grow it in the lab. Until just now that is, hence the note in the Sci-tech Info section announcing the possibility of mass-production.

The other really nifty piece of sino-information occurs in the opening section of an Around China piece on the Zhenyuan Yi-Hani-Lanu Autonomous County. It seems that this ancient tea-growing area, with its tea-dominated forests, boasts what is considered the oldest and largest tea plant in the world. At 25 metres tall, almost 3 metres in diameter and an alleged 2,700 years of age, it is apparently quite the tourist attraction, and “its fleshy, glossy leaves produce a strong and lasting flavour.”

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Cereals databases

Before I disappear for a few days of immersion in the First International Breadfruit Symposium back in Fiji, let me point to two somewhat complementary online resources on cereals genetic resources that I have come across – no doubt Jeremy will say and about time too – in the past couple of days.

The FIGS database brings together passport and evaluation data on bread wheat landraces from a number of the major genebanks and “allows the user to efficiently interrogate the data associated with this collection and provides the capacity to identify custom subsets of accessions with single and multiple trait(s) that may be of importance to breeding programs.” FIGS stands for “Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy,” and the focus is on identifying material with resistance to abiotic and biotic stresses.

The other database is that of Israel’s Institute of Cereal Crop Improvement, which includes information on accessions of wild cereal relatives collected over the past 30 years. Again, there’s a particular focus on data on disease resistance.