Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Darrell Rankin reminisces about Erna Bennett:
She told me about flying unarmed bombers from the U.S. to Britain, how her facility with languages led to her recruitment to the intelligence services, how she was parachuted into Greece, about her capture and liberation from Gestapo custody, how the British took Greece over after the war (the bullet holes are still visible) and about her career in the FAO.
And that’s not the half of it…
When we last checked on the cut-throat world of Californian strawberries in 2014, the Strawberry Commission, a grower’s association, was suing UC Davis for control of the content of the university’s vaunted breeding programme. The whole thing was precipitated, you’ll remember, by the breeders involved wanting to move on, and take their material with them.
Well, that was apparently settled out of court in early 2015, followed by all sorts of commitments on both sides to work together, and a review of the programme by the state auditors. That included the following recommendations:
That doesn’t seem onerous, or unreasonable, to me. But it’s a dog-eat-strawberries world out there, and it looks like the agreement didn’t stick.
Yes, the breeders concerned, who have set up a private company in competition to the UC Davis programme, are now suing their former employers because, they allege, they have been denied the opportunity to license the material they originally produced.
What’s going on? University strawberry breeding programmes in other parts of the country don’t get into such hot water. Thing is, we’re not talking peanuts here.
UC Davis’ breeding program has been crucial to the industry and a big money-maker for the university. Between 2005 and 2014, strawberry nurseries around the world paid UC Davis royalties totaling $50 million. In return, nurseries and their customers – the farmers – have been able to deliver huge improvements in taste and durability developed by the Davis scientists. The two scientists themselves have earned several million dollars, their share of the university’s royalty income.
Strawberry varieties developed at UC Davis account for about half of California’s $2.6 billion-a-year crop. Some of the top names in the business, including Dole and California Giant, rely on UC Davis’ technology.
There are some big players involved, and big money. This won’t end any time soon, I suspect. But the university seems upbeat about the future.
You may have seen the press reports about the disease wheat blast, previously restricted to South America, reaching Bangladesh. The more technical news pieces in the likes of Nature make the point that the source was Brazil, but do not always make it as clear as they might what a veritable tour-de-force of international collaboration in pathogenomics it was to get to that conclusion.
It’s of course all thanks to the Open Blast Initiative, an effort to get sequence data on the causal fungus into the public domain as quickly as possible. Their website helpfully provides a handy timeline, which I reproduce with some slight editing below:
So, less than two months from the first reports of the disease in Bangladesh to the discovery of where the little blighter came from. Impressive. And we now also have a pre-print out on the taxonomy of the organism involved, which suggests that multiple species are to blame. And that’s started quite a online discussion. A great advertisement for open data, not to mention a more flexible approach to publication and peer review.
The next step, of course, is to look for resistance to the different strains of the pathogen in the world’s wheat genebanks and breeding programmes.
…plant pathologists say that finding one variant is not enough: wheat strains must be bred with multiple genes for resistance, to stop M. oryzae quickly overcoming their defences… “What I would hope for out of this sorry situation … is that there will be a bigger international effort to identify resistance genes.”
Let’s see if the breeders are as fast and open with their international collaboration as the pathologists. Stay tuned.
Rowan is incensed about an NPR article denigrating tiger nuts that we Nibbled.
The article does this delicious food no justice and a bit more research would have gone a long way.
Read the whole thing, and have your say.
Announcements such as this from UC Davis, of the launch of the Global Tea Initiative, make me wish there was a market for roving agrobiodiversity bloggers and tweeters. Alas, I’m reduced to the usual ploy of asking participants if they’d like to blog the thing for us.
Will genebanks be discussed? There aren’t that many collections around the world, and one of them, in Japan, accounts for 7,500 of the 11,700 accessions WIEWS knows about. And where’s China? Can’t help thinking that’s not altogether healthy. Lots to talk about…