Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

February 10, 2015February 10, 2015

New version of banana genebank information system goes live

Great to see a new version of the Musa Germplasm Information System (MGIS) released. The URL is unchanged. The key improvements are listed as follows (slightly edited):

1. All information on a single accession can be viewed in one page
2. Taxonomic content of each collection is summarized graphically.
3. Easier data filtering and export functions.
4. Users can share comments on any accession.
5. Accessions can be requested online via the Musa Online Requesting system (MORS) with a modified interface.

I particularly like the ability to comment, though you do have to register for that. The data cover 2,281 accessions from six genebanks around the world, ¹ including 1,456 in the International Transit Centre (ITC) managed by Bioversity International in Belgium:

The ITC data are also in Genesys, which shows 1,529 accessions rather than 1,456. I assume MGIS is the more up to date, but I’m unclear why there should be a difference. ²

You can search among the 2,281 accessions on name or number; or by filtering by any combination of genebank, species, subspecies, genome group (AAB, say), subgroup (Cavendish, say), country of origin, ploidy, whether there’s a photo, whether it’s been included in a molecular study, and availability. Searching is pretty fast.

Each accession gets a nice page summarizing all the pertinent information.

Screen Shot 2015-02-10 at 9.33.10 AM

That information can include morphological characterization data, and illustrations, as you can see above, but I could not find a way of searching the database based on a particular descriptor or combination of descriptors. You get a map when collecting locality is known, but you can’t map multiple accessions, as far as I could see. You’d have to do that in Genesys, I guess.

If you want to download data, you have to cut and paste accession numbers into a form on another page, and then you get a CSV or XLS. It didn’t look to me like you could export either morphological characterization data or molecular data. I have to say I was disappointed by the whole export thing.

So, some good things, some not so good things in this new version of MGIS. I’ll be keeping an eye on it for further developments. And continue playing with it, of course. Maybe I missed something.

February 9, 2015February 8, 2015

First thing, pawpaw, you gotta requisition a new name

Crowdfunding is one of the miracles of the internet age: put even the wackiest idea in front of a bajillion people and enough of them will pledge money to make it happen. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when Luigi sent me a link to Peterson Pawpaws Go Global. R. Neal Peterson wants your money to help him sell his pawpaw varieties. He needs $20,000 to trademark names for six of the varieties he has bred, so they can be sold in Japan and Europe. And he’s doing pretty well, with almost half of his goal and 16 days to go.

I’m not here to argue the rights and wrongs of asking folk to help defray what I would have thought were normal business expenses. I am concerned about that name. Of course, Peterson’s Pawpaws has a nice euphonious ring to it, but then so do melonette and strawberry peach, but you won’t find those names on any grocery labels.

You will, however, find kiwi fruit, though not in all its diversity, and the story of how the Chinese gooseberry came to be first a melonette and then a kiwi fruit is fascinating. ³

I happen to think that, for all their attractive alliterative allure, Peterson’s Pawpaws could use a little kiwi style re-branding. ⁴ Not that I have any great ideas. I just think that what with mountain pawpaws and papaya, which lots of people know as pawpaw, there’s just too much room for confusion.

What to call it? Banango has a certain misleading ring to it. Peterson’s varieties are all named after rivers, most of which in turn borrow from native American names. That’s why I quite like rassimin, apparently a native American name that is reflected in the genus Asimina.

You can surely do better.

February 9, 2015February 9, 2015

Brainfood: Cassava descriptors, Core collections, Oat breeding, Indigenous fruits, Sandalwood in Fiji, Eggplant diversity treble, Globally important mushrooms, High amylose rice, Chickpea diversity, Finger millet diversity, Lethal yellowing, Spanish peppers, Local potato experts

Selection of the most informative morphoagronomic descriptors for cassava germplasm. From 51 to 32. Hardly seems worth it. And dropping descriptors can be dangerous.
Advances in core collection of plant germplasm resources. In Chinese, alas, but it sounds intriguing.
Trends in breeding oat for nutritional grain quality – An overview. You want high β-glucan, and you can get it by breeding for high yield, luckily. A. atlantica has high β-glucan.
Indigenous Fruit Trees of Tropical Africa: Status, Opportunity for Development and Biodiversity Management. Need for “exploiting the under-tapped treasuries of IFT.” Still? People have been saying that for years. They’ve even designated agroforestry systems as globally important and everything.
Promoting Santalum yasi Seeman (Sandalwood or yasi) in agroforestry systems to reverse agrodeforestation in Fiji. An attempt to introduce a high value species into a threatened agroforestry system. Not just fruit, then.
Genetic diversity and population structure of wild/weedy eggplant (Solanum insanum, Solanaceae) in southern India: Implications for conservation. Quite a lot of geneflow.
The potential for crop to wild hybridization in eggplant (Solanum melongena; Solanaceae) in southern India. Transgenes from the crop could spread to the wild relative.
Variation in Antioxidant Activity and Flavonoid Aglycones in Eggplant (Solanum melongena L.) Germplasm. So, the leaves are good for you. But I suspect they taste like crap.
The Qingyuan Mushroom Culture System as Agricultural Heritage. Would pay money to see that.
Selecting High Amylose Rice Germplasm Combined with NIR Spectroscopy at the RDA Genebank Conserved. From 9481 to 14 with high amylose and decent agronomy. But why bother?
Field response of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) to high temperature. There are some heat tolerant lines in the ICRISAT genebank.
Genetic diversity in East African finger millet (Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertn) landraces based on SSR markers and some qualitative traits. The diversity is high, mainly within countries, and missing from the ICRISAT minicore. Naughty.
Analyses based on the 16S rRNA and secA genes identify a new phytoplasma subgroup associated with a lethal yellowing-type disease of coconut in Côte d’Ivoire. The international genebank is threatened.
New Insights into Capsicum spp Relatedness and the Diversification Process of Capsicum annuum in Spain. Limited genetic diversity has differentiated in Spain into pungent, elongated peppers in the South and Center, and sweet, blocky and triangular types in the North.
Knowing native potatoes: finding local experts through innovative methods in the Peruvian Andes. Community Biodiversity Register methodology applied to potato landraces. Don’t see anything much new here, but good to have it nicely documented.

February 8, 2015February 8, 2015

Is cocoa still cursed?

It is always fun seeing what other people do with a story you’re reasonably familiar with. So it was listening to The Chocolate Curse, a recent episode of Planet Money. ⁵

Long story short: Ecuador’s fabled cacao industry went bust in the 1920s because all the wonderful old trees fell prey to witches’ broom. Along comes a diminutive, independent cacao breeder who, on his 51st cross, produced a diminutive cacao tree that is resistant to witches broom. Alas, the variety, called CCN51, tastes like “rusty nails,” and worse. That’s it in the picture.

We’ve actually been here before: Unintended consequences of cacao breeding. What has changed, according to Planet Money, is that the big chocolate manufacturers have found ways to make use of the less than tasty CCN51 beans. Ecuador has planted it like there’s no tomorrow, and it has spread to lots of other cacao-producing areas too.

Yay!

Two things surprised me about the story, as told by Planet Money.

1. Nobody seemed to think that, having seen their original cacao industry devastated by a disease, a similar thing might possibly happen when more than half of the cacao trees in Ecuador are just one variety.

2. Having seen their original cacao industry wiped out by a disease, nobody made the connection with the fruit Ecuador is even better known for: bananas.

February 7, 2015February 4, 2015

There’s more to kiwi fruit diversity than you think

I love photos of weird plants, and the Facebook group Rare Fruit-Rare Edible Plants is a great place to find them. Once in a while, you even get a photo of diversity in a weird plant, which is even better. Case in point is this great visual summary of diversity in Actinidia. Except of course the Facebook version had no caption, which was annoying as hell. Fortunately, thanks to Google Image Search, I was able to track down the original source, a 2008 paper in BMC Genomics. Now, where can I get some of these to taste?