Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

February 6, 2015February 4, 2015

Bottleneck slides

Try and find an illustration of the domestication bottleneck — to put in a slide for a presentation, say — and likely as not you end up with some variation on a classic theme, this particular version being from the great Teacher-Friendly Guide to the Evolution of Maize:

bottleneck

That’s fine for some purposes, but sometimes you want real data, and then you might use this:

fig7

But I don’t really find that particularly striking, do you? And that’s why I really got excited about Fig. 1c in a recent paper about patterns of genomic diversity in a bunch of soybean accessions, ranging from wild populations to modern varieties. It’s really tiny in the paper, so I’ve blown it up here, at the expense of some quality:

I think this really shows very compellingly how the genetic diversity space shrinks and shifts as you move from wild soya to modern varieties. You don’t even really need to know that the axes are principal component scores or indeed how diversity was measured. But is this kind of diagram common out there? I can’t remember seeing anything quite this clear, and some rapid googling drew a blank too. Well, perhaps I read the wrong journals.

So here’s a question for you: what’s your favourite illustration of the domestication bottleneck, using real data? If we get a decent number of examples, I’ll try to put them all together in a post, and maybe even organize a vote.

February 5, 2015

Featured: You say konbucha

Julia M. Schumann begs to differ with Jeremy on a point of Japanese linguistics:

In reference to the spelling question of konbucha (or kombucha) vs kobucha, I think that it was not so much a spelling mistake on the part of either author as a case of multiple pronunciations for the same meaning.

Get all the nerdiness.

February 5, 2015February 4, 2015

Mchele ni kila kitu

Well, actually the quote in National Geographic’s blockbuster on food — The Next Green Revolution ¹ — is “Mihogo ni kila kitu,” which means “cassava is everything” in Kiswahili. I changed it to “rice is everything” because I want to highlight the illustrations in the article that shows the pedigree of IR64 Sub1, IRRI’s famous flood-tolerant rice. There’s also fun stuff in the article about cassava, and other crops, but I’ll leave that to you for now.

You know we’re great fans of pedigree diagrams here on the blog, because they’re so good at showing how important it is for crop breeding programmes to have ready access to the widest possible range of genetic diversity, from as many different places as possible, preferably in a genebank. Anyway, I don’t of course know what it looks like on your screen, but on mine the illustration was disappointing. If you see the whole pedigree, then you don’t see the caption; if you get one of the captions, then you only see part of the pedigree; and you can’t see both captions at once. So I’ve taken the liberty of putting the whole thing together. Here it is. You can click on it to see it better. I hope you like it. And I hope National Geographic doesn’t sue us.

February 4, 2015February 4, 2015

CGIAR to listen — again

There are “cross-cutting topics of global importance — women and youth; climate change; and capacity development — [that] will systematically strengthen and build coherence in research across all domains and Intermediate Development Outcomes (IDOs).” Should not conservation and sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity be one of these?

We posed that trenchant, though perhaps predictable, question last November, as CGIAR asked all and sundry for input on their new Strategy and Results Framework (SRF). Well, all and sundry have been heard, and the new version of the SRF is out. The answer to our question is, alas, no. The cross-cutting themes — now gender and youth, climate change, policies and institutions, and capacity development — still do not include agrobiodiversity.

But leaving it at that would be unfair. Remember that in the old SRF, as we pointed out last time, “use of genetic diversity … only contribute[s] to the reduced poverty outcome, and then only via increased agricultural productivity.” Here’s the chart to jog your memory, and sorry again for the poor quality. The sub-IDO in question is the one that breaks the symmetry of the left-hand column, click on the image to see it a bit better:

Here’s the new schema, thankfully now more legible:

Equally thankfully, conservation of genetic resources now contributes to the System Level Outcome of improved food and nutrition security for health, in addition to that of reduced poverty. See that little extra line going right and up from the IDO of increased productivity? That’s what a small victory, of sorts, looks like. And there are additional sub-IDOs that we can also get behind:

Increased genetic diversity of agricultural and associated landscapes.
Agricultural systems diversified and intensified in ways that protect soil and water.
Optimized consumption of diverse nutrient-rich foods.

So I guess we can say that people saying things very much like those we say here have been heard, at least a little bit. Let the second round of consultations begin! The Consortium Board and then the Funders Council sign off on the SRF in March and April, respectively.

February 3, 2015February 4, 2015

The US picks…wheat

Nice to see a commercial airing during the Super Bowl that highlighted the importance of biodiversity in general and agricultural biodiversity in particular.

http://youtu.be/pkPZ-xW1DM4

Not so cool that they managed to ascribe the origin of wheat to the wrong continent, and indeed hemisphere, but I guess they were thinking of those amber waves. For me, the US should have picked the cranberry. Complements anything.