- Indirect Effect of a Transgenic Wheat on Aphids through Enhanced Powdery Mildew Resistance. Plants resistant to fungus have more aphids. Oh dear.
- A case study of seed exchange networks and gene flow for barley (Hordeum vulgare subsp. vulgare) in Morocco. There is more movement of material among villages than interviews suggest.
- Evaluation of plant-derived products against pests and diseases of medicinal plants: A review. Extracts from some medicinal plants used to protect other medicinal plants.
- Identifying key knowledge needs for evidence-based conservation of wild insect pollinators: a collaborative cross-sectoral exercise. Top one: How important is the diversity of pollinator species to the resilience and reliability of the pollination service? Seems a pretty good start.
Abusing my position on Kasalath rice
OK, so we don’t have the clout or industry standing of The Financial Express, of Tropicana Tower (4th floor), 45, Topkhana Road, GPO Box 2526 Dhaka–1000, Bangladesh. But we have our pride.
So when we saw this paragraph in a major outburst of nationalistic pride concerning Kasalath rice …
Well, we were just a tad peeved.
I went online and fired off a very polite Letter to the Editor.
In your article BD gets IRRI recognition as origin country of rice variety Kasalath you describe the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog as “an IRRI blog”. As part-owner of that blog, I can assure you this is wrong. Please issue a correction and edit to state “Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, an independent blog”.
I look forward to your swift response.
Except that online security at The Financial Express leaves a little to be desired. Having told me to type the characters I saw into the box, it failed actually to display any characters. Nothing daunted, I found an actual email for the actual editor, and sent him the same message, with a PS alerting him to the problem with his security.
Back, snappy as anything, came an email, requiring me to reply in order to pass their stringent security checks. I did so. Back came another email, which I reproduce in its entirety.
Since then, not a word. Not one. After two whole weeks, the erroneous statement stands, an affront to our puffed-up sense of self-importance.
What to conclude? It isn’t as if we object to being associated with IRRI, just that, well, we aren’t.
Just as Kasalath isn’t actually a Bangladeshi rice. It’s just a rice that grows on land in that country, and some other countries.
Botanical lab wins big prize
In a surprise decision the 2012 Stirling prize went to neither of the critics’ favourite buildings, nor to the Olympic Stadium. The winner is a relatively modest laboratory in Cambridge, designed by Stanton Williams, set in the university’s Botanic Gardens.
How wonderful that a laboratory in a botanic gardens should have won the 2012 Stirling Prize, awarded to the building that has “made the greatest contribution to British architecture”. Apparently the scientists who work there love it too. Any of you working on crops or wild relatives? And that reminds me, I wonder whether they’ve appointed a new Director yet. We’re both available …
The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near
There’s quite a lot of metaphor coming out of ICRISAT lately, for some reason. First we had Genes of Gold, referring to the use that the centre has made of the biodiversity within its crops in developing new, improved varieties. Then today we have a video on the Jewels of ICRISAT, which includes a couple of the aforementioned new varieties, plus the genebank itself.
The genebanks of the CGIAR, of which ICRISAT is one, have of course on occasion been described as the crown jewels of the system. They cost $21 million a year or thereabouts. Which seems cheap for crown jewels. Especially compared to the sort of price tag people are putting on saving the whole of biodiversity, rather than just that part of it which feeds us all.
Featured: EU regulations
Richard Hardwick points us to the full text (PDF, 23 pages) of that “[w]eird statement on genetic resources from EU Commission” we mentioned in a recent Nibble.
I think its from the people who promised “to explore the scope for developing a strategy for the conservation of genetic diversity.”
Right. So who’s going to read it for us?