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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. 1 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.

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Brainfood: Ag vs biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Genomic association, Diversity and productivity in forests, Increasing diversity

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Telling it like it is for rice in Nepal

I’d like to pretend that our absence yesterday was a mark of solidarity with all the netizens protesting against the proposed SOPA/PIPA laws in the US. It wasn’t; we were just both snowed under. But we do think SOPA/PIPA is a mistake.

The latest issue of IRRI’s magnificent organ Rice Today contains an article on Seeds of life in Nepal. All good stuff, about how private companies and the state supply less than 10% of Nepal’s rice seed needs. The rest comes from the informal seed sector. IRRI stigmatizes those seeds as being “low quality”. So, along with the National Rice Research Program, IRRI swung into action, setting up farmer trials of modern varieties, which “within a short time … were identified as superior to local lines”.

They were Radha-32, Ghaiya-2, IR55435-5, Pakhejhinuwa, Radha-4, Ram Dhan, Barkhe-3017, Sunaulo sugandha, Barkhe-2024, and NR-1824-21-1-1.

To get seed to farmers, the project helped set up local seed producer groups, which ramped up production from 4 tonnes to 30 tonnes over three years. Even that, however, was enough for only about 1 in 10 of the farmers in the immediate neighbourhood. More groups followed in other villages, and everyone is now happy.

Except us and some people in Nepal.

The article boasts that “millet and maize that used to replace rice on the table are now feeds for livestock and poultry”. Is that an unalloyed good thing?

Were the local varieties really that bad, and were they conserved? Nepal has a good record of participatory plant breeding (PPB) and community seedbanks and seed producers, set up with local NGOs and other research centres, although one wouldn’t know it from IRRI’s article. Some of the PPB varieties produced in those projects were used by IRRI in the on-farm trials; no mention of those either. Were they rubbish? Or are their names in the list without saying where they came from? LI-BIRD, the NGO most closely associated with PPB and seed producer groups in Nepal, recently published its report for 2009-2010; it contains an article on Community based seed production and another on Community seed banks.