Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

November 4, 2014

The new Eurisco hits a pothole

EURISCO is a search catalogue providing information about ex situ plant collections maintained in Europe. It is based on a European network of ex situ National Inventories (NIs). Currently, EURISCO comprises passport data about 1.1 million samples, representing 5,929 genera and 39,630 species from 43 countries.

Between 2003 and 2014, EURISCO was hosted and maintained by Bioversity International, Rome, Italy. Since 15th April 2014, these responsibilities are being moved to the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Gatersleben, Germany. After adapting to a new IT infrastructure, important medium-term actions and objectives will be strengthening the network activities and incorporating phenotypic information about the collection, to name a few.

EURISCO is maintained on behalf of the Secretariat of the European Cooperative Programme for Plant Genetic Resources (ECPGR), in collaboration with and on behalf of the National Focal Points for the National Inventories.

That’s from the welcome screen of the new Eurisco interface. Of course I had to have a go. Bad decision.

First, I just used the “Search” interface, but it turned out that if you want to search on more than one thing at once (say, crop AND country of origin), you have to go to the “Advanced search” screen. I searched for Hordeum landraces from Armenia: No data found.

Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 10.12.24 AM

Strange. Try Genesys, which includes Eurisco data: 232 accessions. Ouch. What happened?

To cut a long story short, here’s the problem. The new Eurisco interface forces you to choose “Yes”, “No” or “Unknown” for both “MLS Status” AND “AEGIS” status. You can’t just ignore these descriptors, as you can in Genesys. That means that if you want to just know about barley landraces from Armenia, irrespective of whether they’re in the MLS or in AEGIS, you basically have to do nine searches, i.e. every combination of the three states in each of those two descriptors. Not ideal, I submit.

Over to you, IPK.

November 4, 2014

Featured: Millet in Uganda

John Mulumba of NARO, Uganda weighs in on that millet controversy:

Sorry to join in this late. Uganda certainly produces far more finger millet than pearl millet. The second map therefore gives a picture close to what is on ground.

Any other views on this?

November 3, 2014November 2, 2014

Fighting the Ebola of maize

Speaking of Denise Costich, she recently visited CIMMYT’s Global Maize Program in Africa and shared this photo — frightening, and yet also hopeful, as she explains below:

maize

Maize Lethal Necrosis (MLN) is being called the “Ebola of maize” — it is actually a “perfect storm” of two viruses hitting the plants at the same time, carried all over the place by insect vectors… It’s hitting East Africa really hard right now, and CIMMYT scientists are screening as much germplasm as they can, in the search for resistance genes. Here you see an example of a “moderately tolerant” line. To the left of that plot, you can see another line that was completely decimated…

I’m featuring Denise a lot lately to make up for the fact that I forgot to take a photo of her to include in the mosaic of CGIAR genebank managers :)

November 3, 2014November 3, 2014

Brainfood: Enset & cattle, Evolution Canyon, Indian spices, Bohemian fruit rhapsody, ILRI forage genebank, Wild sunflower, Agroecology, Holistic hazelnuts, Culture & conservation, Salty broomcorn, Fancy mapping, German cherries, Ethiopian barley nutrients

Sidama Agro-Pastoralism and Ethnobiological Classification of its Primary Plant, Enset (Ensete ventricosum). The Sidama feed the high-protein parts of enset to cattle and then get their protein from milk. Seems a roundabout way of going about things but I guess they know best.
Evolution of wild barley at “Evolution Canyon”: adaptation, speciation, pre-agricultural collection, and barley improvement. One-stop shop for researching evolution of a crop wild relative.
Spices and Condiments: Status of Genetic Resources and Setting Priorities for Introduction in India. National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources is on the job, collecting at home and acquiring from genebanks abroad.
Inventory and conservation of fruit tree landraces as cultural heritage of Bohemian Forest (Czech Republic), indicators for former settlements of ethnic minorities. That would mean Germans. No word on whether the database has been cross-checked with that of BLE-IBV. Interested in the topic of European landraces in general? Try this from Bioversity.
Forage Diversity: An Essential Resource to Support Forage Development. ILRI’s genebank deconstructed.
Wild Sunflower Species as a Genetic Resource for Resistance to Sunflower Broomrape (Orobanche cumana Wallr.). Pretty much all the perennial species have resistance, and many of the annuals. Thank goodness for the USDA collection, eh?
Agroecological Research: Conforming — or Transforming the Dominant Agro-Food Regime? Bit of both? Is that such a bad thing?
A multidisciplinary approach to enhance the conservation and use of hazelnut Corylus avellana L. genetic resources. Holistic, even.
The Cooked is the Kept: Factors Shaping the Maintenance of Agro-biodiversity in the Andes. Keep your culture, keep your crop diversity.
Response of broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) genotypes from semi arid regions of China to salt stress. 39 out of a core collection of 195. Result!
Vital Signs: Integrating Data To Visualize the Human, Agriculture, and Nature Nexus. Sounds promising enough an effort to bring together livelihoods, production and environmental data, but when you go to the website (for Tanzania in this case), all you get is a bunch of admittedly very pretty pdf maps.
Phenotypic and genotypic characterization in the collection of sour and duke cherries (Prunus cerasus and ×P. ×gondouini) of the Fruit Genebank in Dresden-Pillnitz, Germany. …give different results. If I had a dollar…
Genome-wide association mapping of zinc and iron concentration in barley landraces from Ethiopia and Eritrea. There are QTLs. Now what?

November 2, 2014January 18, 2021

Searching for Mangalitsa, and more

Mangalitsa Seeing this magnificent beast on Facebook inspired me to revisit an old post on livestock genetic resources information systems.

First, DAD-IS. Turns out there’s data from Mangalitsa or Mangalitza from a number of countries, and it’s not all that difficult to find. Here’s the summary from the “Transboudary breed” section.

Then, DAGRIS. Over to the search page, type in the name, ¹ and click go:

Uhm.

On the other hand…

chicken I then looked for this equally fabulous creature, Vietnam’s Ga Dong Tao chicken, also seen on Facebook, on DAD-IS. I got a nice “breed data sheet”, including photos, but I can’t link to it because there’s no permalink. You’ll have to take my word for it, or go and search yourself. And what is provided as the reference for said data sheet? Why, DAGRIS, of course, though if you go there, you don’t get any photos.

I think there’s some way to go yet in sorting out animal genetic resources information systems.