Well, I’m officially in a quandary. On the one hand, with the risk of TCA-induced (that’s 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, a by-product of microbial activity) taint so high, there’s no reason except snobbishness for jettisoning natural cork for screw-tops and other ways of stopping wine bottles. On the other hand, as this article points out, producers are addressing quality concerns and cork is biodegradable, recyclable, and sustainably harvested from woodlands whose management over centuries has led to high levels of biodiversity. Pass the bottle.
Pirates of Lake Victoria
I mentioned a few days ago that the water hyacinth is making a comeback on Lake Victoria, after being almost eradicated by biological control. That’s sparked a small-scale furniture-making industry, but is obviously bad news for fishermen, who are forced to venture further out into the lake to get good catches. That’s far more than just a nuisance, according to an article in The Nation today. The further you go out from shore, it seems, the greater the danger of falling foul of pirates! The veritable heart of darkness that is the nile perch fishery on Lake Victoria is the subject of a very well-reviewed documentary, “Darwin’s Nightmare,” which I hope to see soon. Have you?
More tea, vicar?
You may remember an earlier – somewhat facetious – post on a possible threat to tea diversity in China. Now, from CropBiotech Update, there’s a summary of a far from facetious review paper on tea breeding in that country. Turns out that the China National Germplasm Tea Repositories can count on some 3000 tea germplasm accessions, and that over 200 improved varieties have been released. Some quite advanced biotechnological approaches are being used to speed up breeding. One of the things the researchers are looking at is developing cultivars with low or no caffeine, using RNAi. Personally, I think caffeine-free tea and coffee, like alcohol-free beer, are a bit like a one-legged man at a butt-kicking contest: useless. But the technology is cool.
Bees in trouble
This short piece from EurekAlert describes research in Spain which compared lots of different honeys and showed that the best for antioxidants is that which bees make from honeydew, the exudate produced by plants when they’ve been attacked by sap-sucking bugs. So let’s all go out and eat more honeydew honey, right? Well, we better be quick about it. Unfortunately, according to this other piece coincidentally also published today, life for European bees is set to get considerably more difficult, due to the incursion of Chinese wasps. It is already pretty bad for American bees in 22 states due to something nasty called Colony Collapse Disorder, according to this. Which completes today’s trifecta.
Very diverse barley discovered … and already under threat?
SciDev.net reports on a paper in Theoretical and Applied Genetics that identifies the world’s most genetically diverse barley varieties. SciDev.net and other press reports focus on the high diversity of the barleys, found growing in farmers’ fields around the captial city of Asmara in Eritrea, as a source of potentially valuable material for improving tropical varieties worldwide. They point out, too, that the populations are threatened by urban development and that Eritrea has no genebank in which to protect them. But does Eritrea really need its own genebank, or have they more pressing priorities? A researcher from ICARDA, which has a perfectly serviceable genebank, was on the team. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture guarantees free access to the material if stored there. Eritrea was one of the first signatories of the Treaty. What’s the problem?
More interesting, perhaps, is a part of the paper that the reports I read neglected to mention. The molecular analysis indicates that the Horn of Africa may be where barley was first domesticated. That honour usually goes to the Fertile Crescent, with the Horn a “secondary centre of diversity”. But Eritrean and Ethiopian barley may actually have been domesticated independently.