Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

February 11, 2014February 11, 2014

Let there always be Pane Nero di Castelvetrano

It all started with a photo of “tumminia bread” on Instagram. It looked yummie, but I’d never heard of tumminia. A picturesque hamlet? A time-honoured though back-breaking mode of preparation? Some ancient grain hanging on precariously on the outskirts of encroaching modernity? A treasured local variety of wheat nurtured by gnarled rustics? I had to know. A little googling revealed that the name refers to an ingredient in the Pane Nero di Castelvetrano, a dark bread made in a small town in the Sicilian province of Trapani.

The bread is made using a leaven system. The flour mix is 80% local and refined semolina durum, described as “blonde grain”. I believe this will be the equivalent grind to “rimacinata”, if I’m not wrong. The other 20% of the flour is from the tumminia durum wheat grain, which is milled quite coarsely, and is a wholegrain flour.

So the next job was to hunt down in genebanks that treasured local variety of durum. Because how long will it continue to be nurtured by gnarled Sicilian rustics in the picturesque hamlet of Castelvetrano, out there on the outskirts of modernity? Thankfully, Genesys says that there are two accessions of tumminia at ICARDA and another two at IPK. They’re not duplicates, I don’t think, the former having been collected in 1973 and the latter in 1985. They all come from Sicily, but the ICARDA accessions from near Aragona, some 100 km southeast of Castelvetrano along the coast, and the IPK accessions from Bisacquino, which is a bit closer, about 60 km east, in the mountains. So several picturesque hamlets are involved, or at least that was the case 30-40 years ago.

Anyway, if you go to the European Wheat Database you get a little bit of additional information, but unfortunately I can’t link to it, so I’ll have to hand-hold you through it. See that thing that says “single search” down the left-hand side? Click on it, and where is says accession name, type tumminia to get to the IPK accessions; now click on either accession number. You’ll get to the passport information on our Sicilian durum accession. Scroll down and on the right-hand side you’ll see a button marked “Link to pedigree catalogue.” If you click on that you’ll land on the entry for tumminia in Zeven’s Genealogies of 14000 wheat varieties, published in 1976. Which says that it is a Spanish landrace. ¹ Awkward. Maybe the gnarled rustics that originally nurtured tumminia are in altogether a different picturesque hamlet, in a different country? Or maybe Zeven was wrong.

Be that as it may, I think we can rest assured that, genetically speaking at least, the key ingredient of Pane Nero di Castelvetrano is probably pretty safe. Even if fewer picturesque hamlets grow tumminia nowadays than formerly, and for all I know the opposite is true, there are those 4 accessions to fall back on, in two separate genebanks, plus safety duplications, and probably even Svalbard. Now to make sure that back-breaking mode of preparation is likewise safe from encroaching modernity.

February 10, 2014February 10, 2014

French grape genebank on the move?

After Pavlovsk and Brogdale, it is now the turn of a French fruit genebank to feel the heat. According to Declan Butler’s somewhat breathless piece in Nature:

Uncertainty hangs over one of the world’s largest and most important grapevine collections. The Domaine de Vassal vineyard, on France’s Mediterranean coast, houses a vast sweep of grape biodiversity that is essential to research and winegrowers in France and around the world.

That would be the Station de Recherches Viticoles of the Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA). For those that know genebank-speak, that is institute FRA139. Plug that into the “institute code” slot on ECPGR’s Vitis database page to get the details of its holdings. Or you can get summary data from WIEWS. It’s actually not the only grape genebank in France, but there’s no word on overlap with other French collections, or indeed with collections in other parts of the world. Numbers vary among the sources, but this collection represents maybe half of France’s holdings of cultivated grape accessions, and a tenth of the world’s. ²

So it’s an important collection, large and well documented, both phenotypically and genotypically. What’s the problem? Well, the lease is running out on the land it’s been on for the past 138 years, and it needs to shift. The move will cost €4 million, and the money isn’t in the budget. INRA says it’s committed to maintaining the collection, and will find the cash. The boffins fret and worry about the disruption to research and possible losses in the process. I asked our friends at the Myles Lab in Canada for their opinion and they do see an upside:

@AgroBioDiverse @BrianFLloyd @plantbiology 1/2 The move is a good idea – offers chance to plant collection in specific experimental design

— Foodimprover (@foodimprover) February 7, 2014

But it is worrying. We’ll keep an eye on it for you.

February 10, 2014April 22, 2014

Brainfood: Genomics trifecta, Ex/in situ, Oat disease resistance, Drying beads, Biodiversity assessment, Maize models, Trees & nutrition, NTFP, Fortification

Maintaining Food Value of Wild Rice (Zizania palustris L.) Using Comparative Genomics. Cultivated cultivated rice assists in the breeding of cultivated wild rice. If you see what I mean.
Mining the Genus Solanum for Increasing Disease Resistance. The key is distinguishing the alleles from the paralogs.
Genetic Dissection of Aluminium Tolerance in the Triticeae. And the trifecta from the Genomics of Plant Genetic Resources book. Rye has most, barley least, and we know how they do it.
Dual Threats of Imperiled Native Agroecosystems and Climate Change to World Food Security: Genomic Perspectives. Genebanks are necessary but not sufficient.
Identification of new sources of resistance to powdery mildew in oat. In the wild species, natch.
Optimum ratios of zeolite seed Drying Beads® to dry rice seeds for genebank storage. 1:1 by weight.
The Biodiversity Forecasting Toolkit: Answering the ‘how much’, ‘what’, and ‘where’ of planning for biodiversity persistence. Yeah, but will it work with agricultural biodiversity?
How do various maize crop models vary in their responses to climate change factors? Enough to make using an ensemble best, not enough to doubt that temperature will be the main factor affecting yields by the end of the century.
Dietary quality and tree cover in Africa. More trees, more dietary diversity, more fruit & veg consumption, though up to a point.
The importance of local forest benefits: Economic valuation of Non-Timber Forest Products in the Eastern Arc Mountains in Tanzania. $42 million a year, spread over 2000 households.
Fortification: new findings and implications. It’s worked in the US for some nutrients, but not for others, and in some case we don’t understand how and why. We know in other cases it is unlikely to work. Nutritionists have to work together with plant breeders. And, we would add, the agricultural sector in general.

February 9, 2014February 10, 2014

The apple of Poland’s eye

You may have noticed a certain slackness in our blogging last week. That’s because we were both travelling for work, Jeremy holed up at an undisclosed location with lots of copy and a red pen, myself in Warsaw, trying to drum up support for genebanks. It was my first time in Poland, and much too short a visit, but I learned a lot. Like that Poland is a huge apple exporter. It also, and perhaps not coincidentally, has a lot of apple diversity, and Poles are very proud of it. Even a small corner grocery shop in Warsaw will have half a dozen and more distinct varieties on display.

That, I was told, is at least partly due to the tireless efforts of the famous apple breeder Prof. Szczepan Pieniążek, founder and long-time head of the Research Institute of Pomology in Skierniewice. The apple genebank there has maybe a thousand accessions still. Prof. Pieniążek has obviously left quite a legacy, despite being, if I understand the Google Translate rendition of his Polish Wikipedia entry, a proponent of quasi-Lamarckian theories, after the fashion of the equally famous Russian breeder Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin. I guess, in breeding, practice is much more important than theory.

February 8, 2014February 8, 2014

Let Buck Marshall feed you

Whatever you think about Big Ag, I’m willing to bet you’ll agree that the new comedy series Farmed and Dangerous is pretty funny. Very clever of Chipotle Mexican Grill, a chain of holier-than-thou but hip Mexican-themed restaurants, to go the satire route to advertise their agroecology and locavore credentials. There’s even the now admittedly de rigueur parody Twitter account. When can we expect McDonalds to follow suit? Or Greenpeace, for that matter.

Did you know that only 50% of animals are used for meat? The rest are for soaps, candles, and leather… sounds like a Friday night to me!

— Buck Marshall (@BuckMarshall) February 7, 2014