Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

March 2, 2015March 2, 2015

Confused? You will be!

There is a nice set of presentations online on what it means in practical terms for a plant germplasm collection to be Nagoya and International Treaty compliant, in this particular case in the UK. I especially like the one by Penny Maplestone, Chief Executive of the British Society of Plant Breeders:
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If you’re still confused, you might like to turn to Carolina Roa’s post on the SMTA.

March 2, 2015March 2, 2015

Brainfood: Identifying accessions, Evaluating yeasts, Using CWR, Wild grapes, Bushmeat and nutrition, Rice evaluation, Tomato characterization, Sugarcane CWR, Nordic livestock, Conservation optimization, Moringa development, Albanian olives

High-throughput genotyping for species identification and diversity assessment in germplasm collections.. 9% of random Brassicaceae samples from Australian Grains Genebank misidentified to species, with some interspecific hybrids.
Methodology for enabling high-throughput simultaneous saccharification and fermentation screening of yeast using solid biomass as a substrate. Everything is now, now, now these days.
Utilization of wild relatives of wheat, barley, maize and oat in developing abiotic and biotic stress tolerant new varieties. Useful summary table at the end.
Patterns of SNP distribution provide a molecular basis for high genetic diversity and genetic differentiation in Vitis species. Different grape species are really different.
Disentangling the relative effects of bushmeat availability on human nutrition in central Africa. Both rational use of some wild mammals for nutrition, and conservation of more vulnerable species, are possible, though in different places.
Blast Resistant Genes Distribution and Resistance Reaction to Blast in Korean Landraces of Rice (Oryza sativa L.). Conventional evaluation of landraces is useless; you really need to look at the genes.
Characterization of a collection of local varieties of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) using conventional descriptors and the high-throughput phenomics tool Tomato Analyzer. Brave new world.
Phylogenetic analysis of Saccharum s.l. (Poaceae; Andropogoneae), with emphasis on the circumscription of the South American species. Allopolyploid, with 2 species belonging in a different genus.
Utilization of farm animal genetic resources in a changing agro-ecological environment in the Nordic countries. Need to phenotype and genotype everything. Now where have I heard that before?
Multi-objective optimization for plant germplasm collection conservation of genetic resources based on molecular variability. Lots of data plus fancy maths can tell you which individuals you should add to an ex situ collection to maximize conserved diversity.
Actual and Potential Applications of Moringa stenopetala, Underutilized Indigenous Vegetable of Southern Ethiopia: A Review. Potential as a source of drugs, but you need to learn to grow it.
Olive in the story and art in Albania. There are old olive trees around castles.

March 1, 2015

KC on TV

Dr KC Bansal, director of India’s national genebank at the National Bureau for Plant Genetic Resources was interviewed on the TV show Eureka recently. Well worth listening to his advocacy for agricultural R&D in general and genebanks in particular. He says he is particularly proud of NBPGR’s wheat characterization work. BTW, the lakh is a unit in the Indian Numbering System equal to one hundred thousand. NBPGR has approximately 4 lakh accessions.

February 26, 2015February 26, 2015

Apples in the snow

You may have heard about the difficult weather hitting the northeast of the United States. That includes Geneva, in New York State, which is home to the US national apple and grape genebank. Well, thanks to Thomas Chao, who’s in charge of those collections, you can now have a see what a field collection of apple looks like under a metre of snow. Here’s the core collections.

And this is a view of the general collection.

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Thomas says these apples should be fine, though he’s a bit worried about some of the grapes. Fingers crossed.

People take genebanks for granted. But they take a lot of looking after, and they can be so vulnerable it is scary.

February 25, 2015February 25, 2015

Featured: MGIS

Max Ruas addresses some of the nerdy MGIS issues we raised:

Regarding the USDA collection based in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, we will correct the FAO CODE in order to be compliant with Genesys, in particular since MGIS is a data provider of Genesys. Then, for the discrepancy of accessions count, this is due to the fact that we now make visible only alive accessions while we provided to Genesys also with lost and eliminated accessions some month ago. It will be fixed as well for consistencies reasons.

Thanks for listening, Max. We look forward to future releases.