Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

April 4, 2017April 4, 2017

Take the AnGR survey, if you dare

Do you hold an animal germplasm (biological samples of reproductive material such as semen, embryos, etc.) or genomic collection (DNA, blood, tissue, etc.)?

Then you probably want to take part in the Global Genetic Collection Survey for Animal Genetic Resources. Open until 24 April.

April 4, 2017April 4, 2017

Plants of the World Online is online

Great to see the launch of Kew’s Plants of the World Online portal.

In 2015, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew launched its first Science Strategy establishing its vision to document and understand global plant and fungal diversity and their uses, bringing authoritative expertise to bear on the critical challenges facing humanity today. The Science Strategy also committed Kew to delivering nine strategic outputs with the overarching aim to disseminate Kew’s scientific knowledge of plants and fungi to maximize its impact in science, education, conservation policy and management. The Plants of the World Online portal (POWO), is one of the nine strategic outputs and its aim is to enable users to access information on all the world’s known seed-bearing plants by 2020…

…Ultimately, POWO will become a single point of access for authoritative plant species information, a multi-dimensional catalogue of plant life, including information on identification, distribution, traits, conservation, molecular phylogenies and uses. The codebase is open source and Kew hopes to support existing partner networks to set up their own portals, creating a distributed network of botanical data hubs. POWO aims to become a resource that has global coverage which can empower and inform citizens, policy makers, conservationists and farmers everywhere, about the importance of plants and fungi to life. In addition, a key function of POWO is to ensure that Kew’s floristic data can be harvested and ingested by the World Flora Online (WFO) portal enabling Kew to support the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) Target 1 2020.

And speaking of harvesting and ingesting, it even has crops! As it develops, I do hope it will include links to genebank and botanical garden collections.

Oh, and since I’m on Kew, don’t forget this year’s State of the World’s Plants Symposium is coming up. Last year there was a section on crop wild relatives. Nothing so agricultural on this occasion, but lots of interesting topics nevertheless.

April 3, 2017April 10, 2017

Never rains but it pours, genebank edition

If running the genebank at the John Innes Institute in the UK is too tame for you, why not check out the job at WorldVeg:

WorldVeg is seeking a highly motivated and experienced Genebank Manager to manage the conservation of the Center’s vegetable germplasm, to lead and conduct research on vegetable genetic resources of both global and traditional crops in collaboration with WorldVeg scientists and partners around the world to assure the safety and duplication of the collection, and to ensure the genetic resources are utilized effectively to benefit the poor in developing countries.

You’d also get to play around with a nifty demonstration garden.

April 3, 2017April 10, 2017

Brainfood: Banana identification, Donkey domestication, Mouse domestication, African cattle, Pig domestication, Biofuels, Biofortification, Genomics for breeding, Species movement, Crop diversity double, N fixation, Ag commercialization models, Wild beans, Brassica domestication, Teaching biodiversity

Molecular and cytological characterization of the global Musa germplasm collection provides insights into the treasure of banana diversity. 16% of 1500 accessions need taxonomic verification. Could have been much worse.
Why the Donkey Did Not Go South: Disease as a Constraint on the Spread of Equus asinus into Southern Africa. Gap in distribution between Kenya and southern Africa until colonial times probably down to trypanosomiasis.
Origins of house mice in ecological niches created by settled hunter-gatherers in the Levant 15,000 y ago. Hunter gatherers inadvertently domesticated the mouse.
The genome landscape of indigenous African cattle. Now we know where the genes for heat tolerance and tick resistance can be found, and it’s where you’d think.
Insights into early pig domestication provided by ancient DNA analysis. In northern Europe, around 4000 BC, people started crossing pigs from the south with local wild boars. What were they thinking?
Recent grassland losses are concentrated around U.S. ethanol refineries. The revenge of geography.
Provitamin A biofortification of crop plants: a gold rush with many miners. “One crucial aspect that needs further experimentation is whether β-carotene-fortified crops can improve vitamin A status in the main targets of the biofortification efforts, that is, malnourished adults and children.” Just going to leave that out there.
Genomic innovation for crop improvement. Longer reads needed. Is there no satisfying these gene-jockeys?
Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being. Species movements affect ecosystem functioning and service provision: “The indirect effects of climate change on food webs are also expected to compound the direct effects on crops.”
Feeding the Household, Growing the Business, or Just Showing Off? Farmers’ Motivations for Crop Diversity Choices in Papua New Guinea. Some people grow lots of crops because it’s cool. But why wasn’t this done at the intraspecific level?
To Specialize or Diversify: Agricultural Diversity and Poverty Dynamics in Ethiopia. Forget coolness, crop diversity makes you less poor.
Biogeography of nodulated legumes and their nitrogen-fixing symbionts. Australia is weird.
Plantations, outgrowers and commercial farming in Africa: agricultural commercialisation and implications for agrarian change. They all have their place.
Genomic history of the origin and domestication of common bean unveils its closest sister species. Wild populations from northern Peru and Ecuador are not derived from wild Phaseolus vulgaris which migrated there from Mesoamerica but are actually a different species which predates the evolution of wild common bean.
Genomic inferences of domestication events are corroborated by written records in Brassica rapa. Five genetic groups, with rapini at the base.
Walking and talking the tree of life: Why and how to teach about biodiversity. Forget ranks, try clades.

April 2, 2017April 10, 2017

The rain in Spain falls mainly on genebank accessions

The last couple of weeks have been all go. Last week I was at IRRI in the Philippines, but I’ve blogged about that genebank before here, so I won’t say much more about it now, save that they have a cool new automated seed sorter. And of course the breeders whom the genebank serves have been very busy, and successful.

Then this week I visited the Spanish national genebank at the Centro Nacional de Recursos Fitogenéticos of the Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología Agraria y Alimentaria, just outside the historic town Alcalá de Henares, not far from Madrid. It’s been going since the early 1980s, and it forms the hub of a network of 37 collections spread out all over the country. As such, it aims to provide centralized long-term conservation for the country’s seed collections, as well as managing the national inventory, which feeds data into Eurisco and thence Genesys.

Great visit to #INIA #genebank just outside Madrid talking @cropwildrelativ project pic.twitter.com/ePFoNpS6QM

— AgroBioDiverse (@AgroBioDiverse) March 29, 2017

Over the years, they have done a great job of collecting crops all over the country, from people such as these.

Significant gaps remain in their holdings of wild relatives, though, hence our visit. This map, from Genesys, gives you an idea of overall coverage. Wild relative accessions are in red.

Pretty impressive. And the current effort to address gaps in the collections of key crop wild relatives will make it even more so.

In addition to the germplasm collection, CRF also houses a fascinating reference collection of wheat spikes, dating back to the 1950s, whose labelling betrays something of a predilection for taxonomic splitting.

Thanks to Luis Guasch, Lucia de la Rosa, and the whole team for the hospitality, and all the hard work safeguarding Spain’s agricultural diversity.