- Changes in the Abundance of Grassland Species in Monocultures versus Mixtures and Their Relation to Biodiversity Effects. Monocultures are ok for productivity, but only initially.
- Agricultural soils, pesticides and microbial diversity. mRNA and high-throughput sequencing show that pesticides affect nitrification rates and soil microbe community structure. Brave new world indeed.
- Making Sense of Agrobiodiversity, Diet, and Intensification of Smallholder Family Farming in the Highland Andes of Ecuador. Want sustainable intensification? Look at the smaller enterprises.
- Genetic variation of barley germplasm from Turkey assessed by chloroplast microsatellite markers. Little genetic similarity between wild relative and landraces in same geographic area.
- A cytochrome P450 regulates a domestication trait in cultivated tomato. Single polymorphism controls fruit size.
- Blossoming Treasures of Biodiversiy. 42. Quinoa – is the United Nations’ featured crop of 2013 bad for biodiversity? It can be.
- From crossbreeding to biotechnology-facilitated improvement of banana and plantain. Quite some progress, despite few breeding programmes. Will it all go GE? Big temptation. I would have made more of the genebank collections, personally.
- Perspectives on the conservation of wild hybrids. There’s more to it than science. Tell that to the banana breeders.
- Revisiting protein heterozygosity in plants — nucleotide diversity in allozyme coding genes of conifer Pinus sylvestris. Those pre-DNA days weren’t a complete waste of time. That mean we can measure genetic erosion?
All you ever wanted to know about seed
A seed bank plans to store a barley seed lot as an active collection at 5°C. The initial viability is 99.5% and the collection has been dried to 10% moisture content. When will viability have fallen to the regeneration standard of 85%?
That comes from a little set of exercises that staff of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank use on the training courses on seed handling and conservation that they frequently organize around the world. Time was when you had to slog through the maths to answer that question by hand. Want to try? Here’s the equation, go for it:
Nowadays, of course, there’s an app for that. Or at least a website, SID, Kew’s Seed Information Database. 1 Just click on Predict storage time, select Hordeum vulgare, enter storage temperature, equilibrium moisture content, initial viability and final viability, and click Calculate. Hopefully you got about 18 years. Easy, no?
Ok, smartypants, so now try this.
You are a forest extension officer working with communities in Burkina Faso to collect and plant Khaya senegalensis, a multipurpose tree species, with a seed oil content of 67%. Seeds are shed during the month of May at an eRH of around 50%. Average climatic conditions in the afternoon in May are 38°C and 40%RH. You use ambient drying during the afternoon to reduce eRH to 40% and then store seeds at ambient temperature (12 month average: 29°C) in large plastic drums. An initial germination test shows that viability is 99%. What will the viability be after 12 months storage under these conditions?
Reconnecting with an old amaranth
It was the US government shutdown, believe it or not, that prevented me posting this item sooner. I needed to link to a GRIN entry, and the website was down for the duration of the stalemate, and then other stuff came up. Anyway, here we go at last.
A few weeks ago we had a meeting in Ames, Iowa, which included a visit to USDA’s North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station and its genebank. The germplasm collections at Ames are not just in the form of seeds. There are some medicinal and ornamental shrubs and trees around in the fields, and of course if you go at the right time of year you can see a lot of regeneration taking place in pollination cages. There are also some demonstration plots scattered around, and the amaranth one turned out to have a special resonance on this occasion.
That’s because one of the accession involved, PI 482051, just happened to have been collected 30 years ago in Zimbabwe by my colleague Jane Toll, who was on the tour, and was very happy, as you can see from the photo, to be reunited with it. 2 David Brenner, the curator, swears it was just a coincidence…
Featured: Dead Souls Revived
Theo is unrepentant about picking on the dead souls in the wild leeks drawer, and throws down the gauntlet:
How many of the one point four million accessions in Europe actually exist, how many are alive, how many of these are available for distribution (sufficient seed), and how many of these are actually distributed on request? And what should we aim at in this regards?
We should organise ourselves, identify the difficulties and try to take them away — as a community. We can’t do that by pretending everything is perfect. Let’s get some clothes for the emperor!
And Lorenzo is ready with needle and thread.
Featured: Crossing CWR
Tom Payne of CIMMYT has a question:
I was wondering if you had ever come across pre-breeding within a crop wild relative species? Not the intercrossing of CWRs with cultivated species, but (for this example) the intercrossing of T. timopheevi accessions to reveal enhanced levels of additive genetic variability, perhaps selecting materials for specific cytoplasmically controlled traits? Thus, from a very limited pool of X number of accessions, Y more accessions could be derived increasing the amounts of materials available to users.
Any takers?