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Featured: DNA

Ford Denison points out that genes may be easier to trace than ideas:

As DNA sequencing gets cheaper (see “Son of Moore’s Law,” by [Richard] Dawkins [reprinted in the Devil’s Chaplain]), identifying the source of germplasm could indeed be automated. Identifying the source of ideas is trickier. If I cross two plants, each leaves a clear fingerprint in the DNA. But if I combine two or more ideas, even I may not remember where they came from.

Which gets perilously close to Matt Ridley’s argument about how ideas make progress.

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Brainfood: Flower microbiome, Salt screening, Sustainble fisheries, Pollinator interactions, Wild pollinators, Forest loss, Landraces, Fisheries collapse, Quinoa diversity, Potted plants, Wheat diversity, Goat diversity, Genomics of domestication

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The unlikely origin of Venere

An Italian walks into a genebank… No, not the beginning of a tasteless joke. But still rather a funny story, so bear with me. The genebank is that of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and the Italian visitor naturally starts discussing Italian rice with the (non-Italian) genebank manager. In particular, he tells him about this strange black rice they have in Italy, great tasting and great for the health, an old traditional Italian variety, dating back to time immemorial. Venere, it is called. Does the IRRI genebank, the largest rice genebank in the world after all, perhaps have it?

So the IRRI genebank manager, who likes that sort of challenge, does a bit of googling, and a bit of trawling of the various databases at his command. And what should he discover, but that the old traditional Italian variety actually traces back to a donation made by IRRI 22 years back. Yes, records agree that in 1991 IRRI sent a sample of a black rice from Indonesia (IRGC 17863, local name “Ketan Gubat”), collected in 1972 in a place called Yogyakarta, to W.X. Ren at the Italian seed company Sardo Piemontese Sementi. Venere is a descendant of Ketan Gubat.

Helping develop a new market in speciality rice has not traditionally been counted among IRRI’s impacts. There’s a first time for everything, I suppose. But there’s a bigger point here. How do you monitor this kind of impact pathway in a systematic way? Continuously chase literature on the use of all the hundreds of accessions a genebank sends out? Unlikely. 1 No, what you really need is a curious visitor who knows a particular variety walking into your genebank.

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Poppy row blooms in Tasmania

Tasmania is convulsed by a row over the shortage of raw material to process into stuff euphemistically labelled “Concentrate of Poppy Straw“. A hint: you can get four kinds of CPS: morphine, thebaine, oripavine and codeine. In response, the government gave one of the processors permission to import 2000 tonnes of raw poppy capsules from Turkey. And in response to that Tasmania’s Legislative Council is holding an enquiry. It’s a bizarre situation, not least because, as long-time readers will know, we find it really hard to understand why Papaver somniferum is encouraged there and exterminated elsewhere.

Reading one newspaper report, there seem to be two ideas at work. One is that the import of 2000 tonnes — around 150-200 containers — poses a huge bio-security risk, presumably from invasive alien plants. And then there’s the question of why there is a shortage of home grown poppy. A commenter says the price he has been offered is too low and that a lot of growers will be anadoning the crop unless profits improve.

Ah, the perils of globalisation. I’m sure TPI Enterprises chose Turkey because it is the cheapest source of the raw material.

p.s. If you’re really interested, you could always apply to become a poppy grower in Tasmania. h/t Brendan Koerner.

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“Cromwo” unmasked as Ozoroa insignis

For the past week I’ve been in a bit of a tiz trying to identify a tree. Of course I searched for cromwo online, but all that turned up was an echo-chamber in which the “information” originally provided went round and round in a self-congratulatory cacophony. We did get some helpful hints of where to look, but they turned up empty too. “Forget it, Jeremy, it’s Chinatown,” someone said. Like Jake Gittes, I couldn’t do that.

And then it hit me. One of my longest-standing and, I like to think, deepest friendships is with a very famous writer and activist who, when we met, had just returned from an ethnobotanical study among … the Pokot! But that was then. Might she know?

I fired off an email. She fired back a reply designed to prepare me for the worst. And then, bingo!

This is your lucky day!

Kromwo is, according to the Kenyan Agriculture and Research Institute’s Agriculture Research Department’s report on the plants I collected (dated 10th april 1979), Ozoroa insignis Del. (Anacardiaceae)

Plural is Kram.

Certainly was! She’d also dutifully noted one of the uses for kromwo:

Burn and mix with milk for flavour.

I cannot describe how happy this made me, because with a formal scientific name, the “correct” transliteration being not much help, it is possible to go looking for additional information. You can find photographs, scientific investigations of the plant’s biochemical properties, misleading English names, and loads of other stuff.

Scientific names really do matter.