Can your genebank go MUSTY?

A really interesting recent episode of the 99% Invisible podcast alerted me to the fact that libraries occasionally get rid of books, something they call “weeding.” Now, genebanks are often compared to libraries, so I was interested to learn about the criteria librarians use in deciding what to weed. It turns out one popular — though not necessarily easy to follow — set of rules goes under the totally appropriate acronym of MUSTY:

M – Misleading, inaccurate, out of date. Unless you’re an official depository for books containing scientific theories that have since been disproved, don’t feel guilty about discarding books about NASA from 1975.

U – Ugly. Books ought to be beautiful, if at all possible. Books that are attractive will appeal to readers.

S – Superseded. If a better book comes along, don’t feel obligated to keep a former edition or favorite unless you are sure it has lingering value.

T – Trivial. People know I like books, and with the best of intentions they sometimes give me volumes that I really have no use for. Remember their thoughtfulness, thank them sincerely, but find a better home for those books – you will all be better off.

Y – Your collection: This book is no longer appropriate for your current passion. If you are finished learning everything there is to know about raising orchids and have moved on to quilting, donate the orchid books to a local club who can use them before they grow misleading, inaccurate and out of date for anyone else. Consider whether you have read it already and intend to do so again; or, if you haven’t read it, will you? Really and honestly?

So if a genebank found itself having to “weed” its collection, would any of these tests help at all? How does the genebank-as-library metaphor stand up to stress-testing?

Not hugely well, it seems to me.

Start with M. It’s hard to see how to apply this to germplasm. An accession might have inaccurate data associated with it, but nobody would get rid of it for that reason. It might be out of date in the sense of running down in viability, but that’s a reason for regenerating it, not binning it.

As for U, I guess this could refer to an accession that has been evaluated for certain traits and found wanting. But you never know what will happen with the next trait you evaluate for. And standards of beauty change.

Can a genebank accession be S for superseded? 1 This might be trickier. Do you need to keep a really old batch of seeds after regeneration, say? But I don’t think you can really easily apply the concept at the accession level.

But maybe you can so apply T. Think of a plant originally collected as a potential forage that turns out not to be useful in that capacity at all. Does it still need to be part of a forage collection?

And that might also go for Y. Some genebanks do have themes: medicinals, forages, biosaline agriculture… If the mandate of the genebank changes, some stuff may need to find other homes.

MUSTY is not the only way that librarians use to guide their weeding. But to the extent that it is, it does not look like it translates to genebanks as easily as the prevalence of the metaphor might lead us to suppose.

Tuber or not tuber

A paper in Cell has really caught the imagination of the media in the past few days. You wouldn’t necessarily be able to guess why from its title, though: “Ancient hybridization underlies tuberization and radiation of the potato lineage.” The reason for all the interest, I guess, is that the hybridization in question was between a potato ancestor with no tubers and a plant that was closer to a tomato. Yes, two genes from distant lineages, neither tuber-forming, combined by chance some 9 million years ago to produce the progenitor of all tuber-bearing potatoes, which then diversified as the Andes were uplifted and themselves diversified. Definitely worth the hoopla.

Jeremy also includes the paper in his latest newsletter.

Cock and bull stories of crop diversity

In his latest Eat This Newsletter, Jeremy deconstructs a paper on Tiggiano and Polignano heriloom carrots…

Culturally, each landrace is associated with a local patron saint, St Vitus in Polignano and St Ippazio in Tiggiano. Flavia Giordano notes that St Ippazio is “the protector of virility and male reproductive health, symbolically linked to the carrot’s elongated shape”. Which is odd, considering that all the commentary I’ve seen, including Flavia’s, agrees that Tiggiano carrots lose their turgidity very rapidly.

…and also points to an article about “the “Garlic Nerds” who are persuading garlic to reproduce sexually and then using the resulting seeds to develop new strains.” No word on the hairiness of said new strains.

Brainfood: EcoregionsTreeFinder, Microbe niches, Herbarium phenology, Green Status Index of Species Recovery, Feral pigs, Trade & biodiversity, African cereal self-sufficiency, Plant protection, Ugandan seed systems, Grasspea breeding, Indigenous knowledge

Is the avocado toast?

Jeremy’s latest newsletter saves me including an interesting paper on the domestication of avocado in a forthcoming Brainfood.

The often humid climate of the tropics means that ancient plant remains are few and far between, making it difficult to trace the long-term history of crops there. Thanks to a dry rock shelter in western Honduras, which preserved “an unparalleled sequence of radiocarbon-dated avocado remains,” researchers have now rewritten its ancient history. The paper is paywalled; I found out about it because one of the universities involved has just published a popular account, which in turn led me to an earlier popular report from another of the universities.

Two key milestones emerged. First, people were tending wild avocado trees as far back as 11,000 years ago. And by 7500 years ago, they had begun to select for larger fruits with tougher skins. Those ages reveal a bigger surprise; they predate the arrival of maize. The standard view is that as maize spread to new locations, it transformed foragers into farmers. The new results show that people were “fully engaged in tree cultivation upon maize’s arrival”.

The research also has a message for the modern avocado industry, 90% of whose fruits are of the single Hass variety. Because they are multiplied as clonal offsets, those trees are all genetically identical and thus all equally vulnerable to any pest, disease or climate change that affects them. The researchers point out that farmers grew avocados from seedlings for millennia, and that much of that genetic diversity lingers in remaining relict populations. As Amber VanDerwarker, lead researcher on the study, points out:

Developing new varieties through seed selection of modern domesticates and wild relict populations growing throughout Central America may provide more success in adapting trees to these changing landscapes than clonal propagation alone.