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Finding a good home for teosinte

Speaking of botanical gardens maintaining collections of crop diversity, this just in:

A large collection of Teosinte seed was recently transferred from Duke University to the Missouri Botanical Garden Seed Bank. Teosinte is the wild ancestor to modern corn and the preservation of its genetic material is important to corn research and supports the long term conservation of crop wild relatives. The collection includes seven different species in the genus Zea and will be stored in long-term freezer storage where it may remain viable for decades. We are in the process of accessioning, drying, counting and repackaging the seed for storage in the freezers.

The Duke collection is not mentioned either in WIEWS or the global maize conservation strategy, so it’s a little difficult to know how important it is. Interestingly, there is a maize collection mentioned in WIEWS from North Carolina State University, and that’s not that far from Duke, but still. Any way you slice it, there aren’t too many collections of wild maize relatives out there, according to the global strategy:

maize collections

It would arguably have been better for the collection to go to USDA, Ames (NCRPIS) or CIMMYT, but Rainer Bussmann, Director and William L. Brown Curator for Economic Botany at the Missouri Botanical Garden (MO) also made a perfectly good case for this option to me on Facebook:

Because we (MO) already had a (smaller) Teosinte collection, and we are housing a large corn collection, so this fit in perfectly.

So that’s another collection that the global strategy doesn’t know about. You can look for crop wild relatives on the PlantSearch database of Botanical Gardens Conservation International, but the secretive world of botanical gardens is such that this will only tell you that a particular plant exists in a garden collection somewhere, not which garden collection.

It doesn’t really matter where this Duke collection ends up, as long as it’s well taken care of, which it obviously will be at MO. But users also need to know where the stuff is, and get their hands on it. Isn’t it time botanical gardens and crop genebanks exchanged information a bit better? Rainer, how about putting the passport data on your new collection on Genesys?

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Featured: Plants Map

Tim likes the sound of Plants Map, but thinks we need a different approach to germplasm evaluation:

We are thinking a lot about this sort of platform at Seed Savers Exchange. Gardeners need better tools to learn what grows well in their area. In this day and age, there are so many models for citizen science projects like that… we just need the funding and a reliable coding partner to make one definitive site for data collection and dissemination. Such a tool would be very useful for breeders and genebanks too looking to crowd source the acts of assessing lines and identifying novel traits — but it would require breeders to screen in a different manner, that being they would need to ask simpler questions and be more open to qualitative data.

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A genebank in central Madrid

Had a nice afternoon out at the Real Jardín Botánico in Madrid last week, offspring in tow (who thankfully didn’t complain too much). It goes back to the late 18th century, and it’s beautifully laid out, and indeed located, though a cool and wet afternoon in early May did not show it off at its best. Anyway, there were a few nice wild Allium specimens out.

18695s

But what really caught my attention were the alley of local olive varieties…

73213s

…and, to a slightly lesser extent, the rows of local grapes.

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I say “to a lesser extent” because some of the grape specimens seemed decidedly ropey to me. But maybe they’ll look better in the summer. Interestingly, the botanic garden does not feature in WIEWS as a genebank. Which it should, as it clearly is, and has been for a while, if the size of those olives is anything to go by.