I’m no expert on access and benefit sharing, but I do know that it is important to give the farmers who developed and maintain agricultural biodiversity a fair share in any profits that may flow from the commercialization of traditional varieties. Over at Blogging Biodiversity, Kathryn offers a detailed analysis of an agreement between the Ethiopian government and a Dutch company that underpins the company’s attempts to do something with teff (Eragrostis tef), the staple grain of Ethiopia. People who are interested in that sort of thing will find it interesting.
More money for tomato genomes
Here’s one that squeaked under the radar a while back. The US is investing US$1.8 million to continue sequencing the tomato and other related plants of the Solanacae family. According to a press release, the work will form part of the “comprehensive International Solanaceae Genomics Project (SOL) Genomics Network database. This will tie together maps and genomes of all plants in the Solanaceae family, also called nightshades, which includes the potato, eggplant, pepper and petunia and is closely related to coffee from the Rubiaceae family.” The data will be fully public.
Just to bring the tomato back down to earth, genius writer Harold McGee points to a scientific paper that could help growers produce tastier tomatoes with absolutely no genomic knowledge. Water them with a dilute salt solution. A solution of 0.1% sodium chloride results in tomatoes with “significantly higher levels of flavorful organic acids and sugars, and as much as a third more vitamin C and beta-carotene (the precursor to vitamin A) and the antioxidant red pigment lycopene,” McGee says. The tomatoes are smaller, but who cares?
Podcasts on Agricultural Biodiversity
One of the problems of casting your bread upon the waters with a blog like this is that we actually have no idea what you — the readers — already know about, what you want, and all that. So while some of you may respond to this item with a knowing, “Cool, podcasts, that’ll be fun” others may be thinking “Podcasts? What is he talking about”.
Rather than explain, I’ll just point you to this college’s explanation (which is both clear and useful) and say that podcasts are like internet radio for all. You download a podcast and can listen to it in one of several ways. You can also easily make your own podcasts for others to listen to, something I hope to try here before too long.
Now, to the meat of this post. Agroinnovations has a series of podcasts on agricultural biodiversity that may be interesting. I have not yet listened to any of them myself (too busy blogging about them) but the topics sound worthwhile: entomology, plant pathology, indigenous varieties, Andean crops and more.
So, if you are one of the Cool, podcasts types, and you get to them before I do, why not post a review here and let us all know what they are like?
Technorati Tags: Agricultural biodiversity, Podcast
Crop wild relatives underused
Are crop wild relatives (CWR) more trouble than they’re worth? There are certainly significant challenges involved in including them in breeding programmes, but you’d have thought that between the new molecular tools that are now out there, the greater numbers of CWR accessions in genebanks, and all the information about how useful CWRs can be, breeders would be falling over themselves to make those kinky inter-specific crosses. Well, according to a major review by our friends at Bioversity International (the outfit formerly known as the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute), the use of CWRs in breeding programmes has been steadily increasing in the past 20 years, but probably not as much as might have been expected. There’s been a number of papers recently on CWRs. This paper, also from Bioversity, looks at in situ conservation of CWR. Check out this for a discussion on the definition of the term, and, from some of the same people, there’s this overview of conservation and use of CWR, using a specific example. Here’s an example of conservation assessment and priority-setting for the wild relatives of the peanut. For a discussion of the possible effects of climate change on these species, see this.
Amazing maize stories
Apparently, maize recovered from ancient burials in NW Argentina is genetically “almost identical” (whatever that means!) to the landraces still being grown in the area. I wonder if it was prepared in the same way too. This piece in the Washington Post certainly shows that maize culinary traditions are strong, and can go back a long way.