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New efforts to domesticate grasses down under

The Australian Research Council has awarded A$ 1 million to Professor Robert Henry of Southern Cross University to examine about 1000 native grass species as potential replacements for wheat, rice and maize. The grant is framed as a response to global warming, but it is pretty interesting under any circumstances. Henry, Director of Southern Cross University’s Centre for Plant Conservation Genetics, told the Australian Associated Press that

the project targets the accelerated domestication of native species which have lower tillage and fertiliser requirements and increased salt, shade, frost and or drought tolerances than the current introduced cereal and fodder crops.

Of course, those grasses have been around since the first farmers landed in Australia, but they never tried to do anything with them. Because they couldn’t?

There is a great opportunity to use the new techniques of modern biology to accelerate the domestication of some of the more promising Australian native species.

Preliminary results are expected within three years, and seeds will be made available through a partnership with Native Seeds Pty Ltd. We shall see.

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Long-crowing chicken origins

You may have noticed a neat new feature on the blog. There’s a “Show on map” link after some of the latest postings which whisks you off to a pointer to the geographic location of the story. Jeremy will say a bit more about how he did it and why later on. I bring it up now because it was the reason why I stumbled on an interesting paper.

You remember that video of the long-crowing chicken from a few days back? Well, how do you geo-tag that? Where does the weird creature come from? The caption on MySapceTV says that it is a pure-bred Totenko cockerel. If you google that, one of the things you get pointed to is a DNA study that suggests that this and a couple of other long-crowers were bred on Okinawa from fighting cocks from southern China or Indochina. Want to see exactly where Okinawa is? Click below…

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Nigerian President has rice initiative

I found a story in today’s Vanguard, a Nigerian news site, that could serve as a case study to illustrate the complexities of the interaction between conservation and use of plant genetic resources. Government imposes levy on rice imports, and launches a Presidential Initiative, no less, on Rice Production, Processing and Export. High-yielding varieties — including the famous NERICA — are multiplied and made available to farmers. A “rice value chain” linking farmers, parboilers, millers, traders etc. is facilitated. A project called Promoting Pro-Poor Opportunities in Commodity and Service Markets (PropCom) is launched, funded by Britain’s DFID, “a market-driven intervention programme that facilitates initiatives which enable the production of quality local rice in sufficient quantities that can compete with imported rice and benefit the poor stakeholders.”

I have two questions for the students who will no doubt be given this case study to ponder in years to come. Is all this good or bad for rice genetic diversity? And will it be good or bad for rice farmers in the long run?

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Ancient Andean agriculture

Meanwhile, on the Western slopes of the Andes, at about the same time as their cousins half a world away were domesticating the cat — which is a lot earlier than has been thought — people in what is now northern Peru were growing peanuts, squash and cotton. That’s according to well-dated macrofossils, as reported in a paper co-authored by our friend and peanut expert David Williams, and picked up in the mainstream press.

We’ve blogged before about recent work that is pushing back the date of agriculture in the New World. There’s a great review of the latest thinking on the “roots of agriculture,” including in the Americas, in the latest Science, but you’ll need a subscription to read it, unfortunately. Anyway, to summarize heroically the new consensus arising from collaboration among geneticists and archaeologists, it seems the process of crop domestication probably took much longer than previously imagined, thousands rather than hundreds of years. And that it may have started at about the same time in different parts of the world, perhaps as a result of changes in climate (and levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere).

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How the cat became a pet

A DNA study of almost a thousand wild and domestic cats from around the world is helping to unravel the evolutionary history of this most numerous of household pets. There are five wild subspecies of nearest-relatives, including one in the Near East, from which all domesticated cats are derived, though there has been subsequent hybridization of house cats with local wild populations here and there. Modern cat breeds can trace their origin to at least five mothers domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around the same time as agriculture started, over 9,000 years ago. And, coincidentally, there’s news also today of archaeological evidence from nearby Cyprus backing up that date.