Human diversity and agricultural biodiversity interact. The variation that exists between and within crops and livestock products in nutritional content is to some extent matched by — and indeed there is evidence that in some cases it has driven — genetic variation between and within the human populations that make use of them. We’ve blogged about this with regard to lactose intolerance and predisposition to iron deficiency. Now comes a study ((Perry, George H. et al. (2007) Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation. Nature Genetics. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ng2123.)) linking variation among human populations in the number of copies of the amylase gene with the amount of starch in their diet ((I learned about it via a post in Carl Zimmer’s blog The Loom, in which he also talks about a couple of other cases of multiple copies of a gene building up in a genome.))
More “contaminated” bison
The ancestors of the bison, or buffaloes, of Catalina Island off the California coast arrived as movie extras in 1924. Scientists have always thought they were more likely to be pure-bred than many of the other buffalo that roam North America, because they’ve effectively been in isolation. Turns out it ain’t so. Nearly half the animals shipped off the island have maternal cow genes. Scientists believe the cross breeding probably occurred before the buffalo were shipped to Catalina — and nothing since 1924 has selected against it.
P.S. As the commenter to our original piece pointed out, nobody seems to have looked for bison genes in cattle. Why not?
E-agriculture practitioners meet
It’s E-Agriculture Week in Rome next week. Lots of people coming, lots of stuff going on. I’ll try to be very Web 2.0 about it and do some posting when cool agricultural biodiversity comes up, but also check out the blog of the centerpiece conference.
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.
Bigger not necessarily better in agrobiodiversity
Jeremy says we sound like a broken record on the lack of agricultural thinking in biodiversity circles at times, and he’s right of course. More charitably, it could be thought of as judicious use of a leitmotif. In which case another one would certainly be the unfortunate dearth of information on nutritional composition at the variety or accession level, certainly as compared to morphological and agronomic information. The reason for that is that genetic resources scientists and breeders have been more interested in things like yield and disease resistance. That’s had consequences.
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