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A second helping of rice

More today to satisfy your hunger for rice information, hot on the heels of the recent paper trying to explain the pattern of genetic variation across and within two subspecies of cultivated rice, discussed by Jeremy a couple of days ago.

First there’s a paper ((Global Dissemination of a Single Mutation Conferring White Pericarp in Rice. Sweeney MT, Thomson MJ, Cho YG, Park YJ, Williamson SH, et al. PLoS Genetics Vol. 3, No. 8.)) looking at how the red pericarp of wild rice became the white pericarp of cultivated rice. The answer is that a mutation arose in the japonica subspecies, crossed to the indica and became fixed in both under very strong selection pressure by ancient rice farmers. They must have really liked those funny mutant white grains when they first noticed them! Oh to have been a fly on the wall — or a brown plant hopper on the rice stalk — when the white pericarp mutation was first noticed in some ancient paddy…

Then comes news that the three CGIAR centres with an interest in rice — IRRI, WARDA and CIAT — are to boost their collaboration to solve the pressing production problems of Africa. There’s talk of forming a consortium. More flags being prepared.

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Food is good

There’s an implicit pro-agricultural biodiversity message in a recent statement by the American Dietetic Association. These seem to be coming think and fast at the moment, by the way: we nibbled an earlier one a few weeks ago. The latest one, which I heard about — belatedly — via the Center for Consumer Freedom, takes a swipe at “pseudo-experts” that either demonize or anoint individual food items in their bully campaigns:

[N]o single food or type of food ensures good health, just as no single food or type of food is necessarily detrimental to health.

That’s why it is always sad when a food crop leaves the agricultural repertoire, and why it is important to find out why it did so.

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Australia invests in wheat genes

You can’t keep a good man down. Dr Ken Street, who may or may not be the Indiana Jones of agriculture, has been explaining why Australia’s Grains and Development Corporation (GRDC) has given $5 million to the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Part of GRDC’s contribution is earmarked for Central Asia and the Caucasus, where wheat and other cereals were domesticated and where there are still valuable genetic resources. The Trust will help to conserve material collected in those regions, which Street says has already demonstrated resistance to three different kinds of wheat rust: leaf, yellow and stripe. GRDC is funded by a levy on Australian cereal farmers, and the genetic resources supported by the Trust will be freely available to all researchers. So, as Street neatly sums up: “the benefit to Australia is access to genes that could solve many current production constraints”.

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I’m blushing. Luigi unavailable for comment

One great resource for doing that is the Swedish-based Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, which I recently added to my blog diet. Many of the stories you’ll find there have been written up elsewhere (often on Worldchanging), but I don’t know of any other news-aggregator-style blog that covers the subject so well. If you’re into this subject, you should be reading it.

Thanks to Alex Steffen at WorldChanging, to which I have long subscribed. Seriously, it’s always nice to be appreciated.

p.s. Alex, You can’t believe everything you read in a domain name.

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One up, one down

Following on from Luigi’s post a month or so back about the probable return of the chestnut to American woods, two stories, on consecutive days, from the Christian Science Monitor. One gives more information about the complex breeding programme that involves Chinese chestnuts, resistant American trees and lots of painstaking crosses to produce blight-resistant chestnuts. That work has been going on since the early 1980s, and may now be close to complete. A few days earlier, the paper reported on the threat to the Eastern Hemlock, a woolly bug, originally from East Asia. Adelges tsugae has been slowly spreading across the US, where the only hope seems to be a decent cold winter. The fear is that the Eastern Hemlock will go the same way as the Carolina Hemlock, which once shared the forests with the American chestnut and which, experts fear, could now be eaten out of existence.