Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
At 1:10 in the afternoon of 31 July 2008, ignoring the advice of his neighbors, Mr. Pal made the decision not to plow under his severely ravaged and sick-looking rice crop. His field had been submerged for 17 days from two floods. And that is when the second Green Revolution began, according to Dr Bob …
It’s a bit of a cheat, but bear with me for a minute and have a look at a couple of quotes from recent articles in the mainstream media. The first one is from the NY Times. Don’t look at the original piece until you’ve read both quotes: Drought-resistant X is now providing a better …
Continue reading “A tale of two CGIAR centres’ media presence”
Yoko Hattori and colleagues report in Nature ((Hattori, Y., Nagai, K., Furukawa, S., Song, X., Kawano, R., Sakakibara, H., Wu, J., Matsumoto, T., Yoshimura, A., Kitano, H., Matsuoka, M., Mori, H., & Ashikari, M. (2009). The ethylene response factors SNORKEL1 and SNORKEL2 allow rice to adapt to deep water Nature, 460 (7258), 1026-1030 DOI: 10.1038/nature08258)) …
You may remember a post a few days ago about submergence-tolerant rice. Our friends at IRRI have been kind enough to explain to me where the gene in question — sub1 — came from. I hope I get this right. It seems the immediate parent for IR64-sub1 was from the cross IR49830, which in turn …
Continue reading “The pedigree of tolerance to submergence in rice”
Robert Hijmans writes: I would like to submit this video to the competition: I believe it is great example of agrobiodiversity at work; and why we have genebanks, screening, and (molecular) breeding programs. The video shows IR64, a widespread rice cultivar, and IR64-sub1 growing side by side on a field at IRRI that experiences a …