- What Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture Are Available under the Plant Treaty and Where Is This Information? It’s really difficult to know, and it shouldn’t be.
- Bridging the gap? Public–private partnerships and genetically modified crop development for smallholder farmers in Africa. They really haven’t worked. But should they have?
- Recalcitrant maize: Conserving agrobiodiversity in the era of genetically modified organisms. Trying to keep landraces and GMOs both physically and conceptually apart won’t work, and doesn’t need to.
- Flavour, culture and food security: The spicy entanglements of chile pepper conservation in 21st century Mexico. Efforts to ensure food security needs to take flavour into account if they are to work.
- Gender differential in choices of crop variety traits and climate-smart cropping systems: Insights from sorghum and millet farmers in drought-prone areas of Malawi. Efforts to improve crop adaptation and resilience to climate change need to take gender into account if they are to work.
- A target cultivar-specific identification system based on the chromatographic printed array strip method for eight prominent Japanese citrus cultivars. Specific DNA markers can be used to enforce plant breeders’ rights.
Brainfood: Lima bean network, Obake rice, Feral Canadian apples, African plum seed systems, Canary Island potatoes, Wild potatoes & late blight, Wild lentils & drought, Wild grapes & salt, Robusta core, Ethiopian barley diversity, De novo wheat domestication
- International Lima Bean Network: from the origin of the species to modern plant breeding. And you can join it here.
- Solving the mystery of Obake rice in Africa: population structure analyses of Oryza longistaminata reveal three genetic groups and evidence of both recent and ancient introgression with O. sativa. The wild African O. longistaminata is closer to Asian O. sativa than to other African wild species, and shows evidence of ancient introgression from O. sativa in southern Africa. Definitely worth a network.
- The origins and evolutionary history of feral apples in southern Canada. They are mainly recombinants involving early heritage cultivars, with no hybridization with local wild species. So, not like rice in Africa.
- Can seed exchange networks explain the morphological and genetic diversity in perennial crop species? The case of the tropical fruit tree Dacryodes edulis in rural and urban Cameroon. Cities are hotspots of African plum diversity because people bring in tress from all over the place. So, a bit like apples in Canada.
- Ancient Potato Varieties of the Canary Islands: Their History, Diversity and Origin of the Potato in Europe. “The Andes end in the Canary Islands.” A bit like how the Caucasus ends in Canada?
- Functional diversification of a wild potato immune receptor at its center of origin. Wild species can be used to improve the late blight tolerance of cultivated potatoes.
- Limited-transpiration trait in response to high vapor pressure deficit from wild to cultivated species: study of the Lens genus. Wild species can be used to improve the drought tolerance of cultivated lentils.
- A Tunisian wild grape leads to metabolic fingerprints of salt tolerance. Wild species can be used to improve the salt tolerance of cultivated grapes.
- Characterization of the genetic composition and establishment of a core collection for the INERA Robusta coffee (Coffea canephora) field genebank from the Democratic Republic of Congo. From 730 shrubs to 263 unique genotypes to 10 plants with 93% of the alleles. Some wild stuff involved. Do the same for African plum?
- Genetic diversity within landraces of barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) and its implications on germplasm collection and utilization. Maybe we should do core collections for each landrace?
- Phenotyping and identification of target traits for de novo domestication of wheat wild relatives. Maybe we should try it with that wild African rice too.
Thriller at the Seed Vault
From the description of the just-released German-Norwegian TV series “Die Saat – Tödliche Macht” (English title: The Seed) on ARD (as translated by Google).
Heino Ferch embarks on a dramatic search for missing persons as a police officer on a private foreign mission: in order to find his nephew, an environmental activist played by Jonathan Berlin, on the polar island of Spitsbergen, he pays no attention to his own life. At his side, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, a Norwegian police officer, tries to overcome her own traumas by rescuing the missing man. Neither of them has any idea what unscrupulous powers and actors they will meet. Over six episodes, series creator Christian Jeltsch and his co-author Axel Hellstenius, and director Alexander Dierbach, create a multi-layered arc of suspense that combines a vividly staged thriller plot with a highly topical business crime thriller. The starting and ending point is the “Svalbard Global Seed Vault”, where valuable seeds from all over the world are stored as genetic backup in the event of a disaster. However, the highly secured mine tunnel also hides a secret that poses deadly dangers for the missing activist – and everyone who has anything to do with him.
Enjoy!
Eat this maize podcast
Jeremy’s latest podcast is out, and it’s a doozie. Plus it saves me adding it to the next Brainfood, which is coming soon, don’t worry people.
Modern maize has long been a puzzle. Unlike other domesticated grasses, there didn’t seem to be any wild species that looked like the modern cereal and from which farmers could have selected better versions. For a long time, botanists weren’t even sure which continent maize was from. That seemed to be settled with the discovery in lowland Mexico of teosinte, a wild and weedy relative of maize. But there was a problem. A lot of the later genetic work to understand the transformation of teosinte into maize found remnants of different types of teosinte.
Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra and his colleagues have sorted out the story, which is now more complicated, better understood, and offers some hope for future maize breeding. Their paper was published last week in Science.
Happy retirement to USDA’s Dr Peter Bretting
Congratulations to Dr Peter Bretting on his imminent retirement from USDA.
After 32+ years of dedicated public service, Dr. Peter Bretting is retiring from his post as Senior National Program Leader for Plant Germplasm and Genomes with the USDA-ARS Office of National Programs. Dr. Bretting has been with National Programs since 1998. Previous to this post, he served as Research Leader and Coordinator, USDA-ARS, North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station (NCRPIS), and USDA-ARS Collaborator-Associate Professor of Agronomy and Botany, Iowa State University. Prior to joining USDA-ARS, he served as Research Program Director, Indiana Crop Improvement Association, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Botany and Plant Pathology, Purdue University.
He rides off into the sunset on a high, having masterminded the USDA’s new National Strategic Germplasm and Cultivar Collection Assessment and Utilization Plan, as requested by the 2018 Farm Bill. That directed the USDA to “develop and implement a national strategic germplasm and cultivar collection assessment and utilization plan that takes into consideration the resources and research necessary to address the significant backlog of characterization and maintenance of existing accessions considered to be critical to preserve the viability of, and public access to, germplasm and cultivars.”
Quite the parting gift. And a worthy final touch to an enormous legacy.
There’s a celebration of Dr Bretting’s career and tremendous contributions to plant genetic research and crop genetics, genomics and systematics on Monday, 18 December 2023 at 1:00-3:00 pm EST. Let me know if you’d like the ZOOM link.
Very best wishes for a long and happy retirement, Peter!