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More on gorilla medicine

It’s wonderful what happens when a real expert gets stuck into a question. Back in November, Luigi briefly blogged a story about pharmaceutical researchers who derived some inspiration from gorillas and their liking for a particular plant. In the comments, Kathryn Garforth Mitchell wondered about the access and benefit sharing aspects of the story. Luigi, characteristically, had no idea, feared for the worst, and hoped he was wrong. Well, maybe his hopes were not in vain, because Kathryn has spent the past four months ferreting out the details and piecing most of the story together. The result is an illuminating series of posts that shows just how complex arrangements can be. I’m not going to link to all four of them; you should start at number one — Gorilla medicine: a complex web — and work your way through them.

One interesting point of direct relevance. Scientists in the US say that they may source the active compounds from plants grown locally in Nigeria or Ghana. This is very atypical of pharmaceutical arrangements, which usually involve discovering the active ingredient in a plant and then synthesizing it chemically. It is also, perhaps, the biggest source of confusion for those interested in access and benefit sharing of specifically agricultural products. While genes may be discovered in farmer varieties and wild relatives, the value of those genes never derives from the manufacture of the gene’s products.

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Online conference for you

Markus Schmidt has invited any readers of this blog to take part in an e-conference on neglected and underutilized species in Asia. The day job prevents me from taking part, but I’m sure it will be pretty interesting, and some colleagues may well be there. I hope we’ll be able to link to the outcomes. Here’s the message from Markus:

Until April 17 2007 the European research project “Agrofolio” hosts an e-conference on Neglected and Underutilized Species NUS in selected southeast Asian countries (Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam) and China. During the e-conference we will discuss our preliminary list of NUS in Asian countries and the role of developed countries ( e.g. Europe, North America, Japan) in their possible support or unintented hindering (e.g. trade barriers) for sustainable use of NUS in Asian countries.

You can participate by registering for free at www.agrofolio.eu/forum/, or send an email to e.conference@agrofolio.eu.

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Tangled Bank

Tangled Bank No. 77 is up at Aetiology, with its usual selection of blog-posts on biology in general. That includes Andy Jarvis’ piece on climate change here, and also news that chimpanzees may have been using tools — stones to crack nuts — for more than 4000 years. That doesn’t quite make them proto-hunter gatherers, but it is somewhat mind-blowing that the scientists were able to identify a bunch of stones as tools.

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Gardens of Agricultural Biodiversity

From the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre, news of the ethnobotany garden. Dr Francis Ng reports that the half-hectare garden, which he designed, is flourishing, and that eventually he hopes to have more than 500 species — including Musa lokok, a previously unknown banana species — used by the local people on hand to study. The garden is close to the Orang Utan Centre at Semengok and has already been visited by schoolchildren. Eventually, Dr Ng says, tourists will be able to visit. Gardens of useful plants strike me as an excellent way to promote the virtues of agricultural biodiversity in a local context. I know of a couple, at Nabk in Syria and the Potato Park near Cusco, Peru, but there must be others.

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Transgenic salmon

One of the major concerns about transgenic plants and animals has always been that they could escape and that transgenes could then spread into wild populations with mostly unforeseeable consequences. ((Contribution by Michael Kubisch)) For most farmed animal species, cattle, goats or sheep for example, this is not much of a problem because there are no true wild populations with which escapees could hybridize. However, farmed fish, such as salmon or catfish, do have wild relatives, reproduce relatively fast and farmed fish do occasionally escape into the wild, even in large numbers. This has led to a number of estimates and models of what impact such transgenic escapees might have on resident fish populations or on their prey species.

A recent article tells a cautionary tale about the value of such predictions by demonstrating that advantages which transgenic animals have “down on the farm”, such as a faster growth rate if they carry extra copies of the growth hormone (GH) gene, may in fact be less obvious  in the wild. The article describes a study in which GH-transgenic and wild-caught coho salmon were compared in either a conventional hatchery or a simulated natural environment. Under hatchery conditions, in which fish were fed a commercially available diet, the transgenic salmon grew to nearly three times the size of their wild cousins. However, in the natural environment, in which fish were exclusively fed natural food items, transgenics had only a 20% weight advantage. When the salmon were introduced to prey species, in this case trout fry, the impact of transgenic animals on their prey was reflective of their environment and size and the impact of transgenics on prey was much reduced.

While this says relatively little about the actual impact of transgenic escapees on resident fish populations, it does show that accurate predictions may be much harder to come by than previously assumed.