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Genebanks forgotten, again

Bill Gates highlights his family Foundation’s work on cassava viruses in his latest letter. We have on occasion wondered here why the CGIAR didn’t make more of its work on that subject.

But anyway. I really wanted to rue a different lost opportunity here.

Historically, increasing the productivity of a crop meant finding two seed variants, each with some desirable and undesirable characteristics, and crossing them until you get a combination with mostly the good characteristics of the two parents. This required actually growing tens of thousands of plants to see how they develop in different growing conditions over time—for example, when water is plentiful and when it is not. Now the process is quite different. Imagine the analogy of a large public library with rooms full of books. We used to have to use the card catalogue and browse through the books to find the information we needed. Now we know the precise page that contains the piece of information we need. In the same way, we can find out precisely which plant contains what gene conferring a specific characteristic. This will make plant breeding happen at a much faster clip.

Would it have killed him to slip in some recognition of the genebanks where all those “books” are so painstakingly and expensively kept?

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Contract farming is good for you — official

en cultivant du riz Many people say that giving smallholder farmers a stronger position in market chains is one of the best methods of helping them out of poverty, and that applies particularly to the neglected, orphaned, underused etc crops that are our bread and butter. Is it true? A new study in World Development says it is. 1 The article is behind a paywall, and even if it weren’t I am pretty confident that I wouldn’t understand the details. So how do I know that “participation in agricultural value chains make[s] smallholders better off”?

Because the author says so.

Which of course he would, although in this case he does so with a blog post explaining just why his study is so much more conclusive than anything that has gone before. And that I could understand. Not the details of how he got there, which is still a long way outside my expertise. But where he got to, which was here:

At the end of the day, I find that contract farming significantly increases the income of participants. Perhaps more importantly, I find that contract farming increases the income net of contract farming revenue of participants. In other words, there are positive spillovers on other sources of income (here, income from from sales of livestock and income from other agricultural sources such as the sales of non-contracted crops and animal byproducts).

More broadly, I’m seeing, and liking, more of these blog posts from scientists about their science. And while not all scientists are capable, not by a long shot, those who can are, I am sure, adding to their reach and impact. Just sayin’

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Looking for low saturated fat sunflowers

The genes for these low levels of saturated fat came from sunflowers that were collected in Hungary and Egypt.

Of course such statements are to me like a red rag to a bull. So, for those of you out there who’ve also never met an off-hand reference to an interesting-sounding germplasm accession they didn’t want to get to the bottom of, here’s what I found.

I can’t be sure, of course, but I’m willing to bet the Egyptian accession is PI 250542. I got that in seconds simply by googling “helianthus low saturated fat genes hungary egypt”, which returned a Helia paper from 2004 as the very first hit. The authors, Vick, Jan & Miller, have this to say right in the introduction:

To address this consumer preference [for low levels of saturated fatty acid], the USDA-ARS Sunflower Research Unit has recently released genetic stocks with reduced palmitic and stearic acids, the major SFAs of sunflower oil (Miller and Vick, 1999; Vick et al., 2003a). Two genetic stocks, RS1 and RS2, were released in 2001 (Vick et al., 2003a). These stocks were derived from a cultivated sunflower line, PI 250542, collected in Egypt by Paul Knowles in 1958. RS1 has black seeds with gray stripes, while RS2 has light gray seeds that usually bleach to white in the sun. Both have a total SFA content (C16 to C24) of about 75 g kg-1.

And then there’s this a little further on in the materials and methods:

RS1 (PI 616494) and RS2 (PI 616495) were used as sources of reduced palmitic and stearic acids in crosses with HA 382 (PI 578871).

The Hungarian germplasm was a bit more difficult to run to earth. But not much. There are 50 or so Hungarian accessions in GRIN which have lower than average stearic acid content, 7 of which are pretty low, but none are really low. There are about 30 which are lowish for both palmitic and stearic acid. But there’s only one with really really low palmitic acid: PI 291408. Its stearic acid content is only average, but my guess is that this is the material alluded to in the article I quoted at the top.

Maybe some sunflower expert will tell me if I’m wrong?

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EU seed law in turmoil?

Good reasons to take the weekend off include the fact that by not being too keen, one avoids certain errors. So I’m glad I didn’t see Patrick’s original post on an opinion delivered by an EU Advocate General in the matter of Association Kokopelli vs Graines Baumaux SAS. 2 At least, not until after he had got things straighter. Here is Patrick’s view of the Advocate General’s views:

First of all the Advocate-General said it is not legal to interpret EU or French Seed Laws as meaning you cannot sell unlisted varieties. YOU ARE ALLOWED TO SELL UNLISTED VARIETIES.

Secondly, the provisions of EU Seed Law that refer to the DUS standard are NOT VALID.

Don’t get your hopes too high for a legal seed supply revolution in Europe. As Patrick explains, there’s a lot more that still needs to happen. But the possibility is that it just might happen, and then Europeans will be in the happy state enjoyed by the entire rest of world, able to buy, sell and grow whatsoever varieties they choose.