Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

November 30, 2011November 30, 2011

Evaluating nutrition interventions

The Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating Centre has a review out of “agricultural interventions that aim to improve nutritional status of children.” There is both good and bad news. The bad news is that

The studies reviewed report little or no impact of agricultural interventions on the nutritional status of children. This result confirms the results of previous systematic reviews on the same topic.

Ouch. The good news is that

…unlike previous reviews, we attribute this result to the lack of statistical power of the studies reviewed rather than to the lack of efficacy of these interventions.

Hardly reassuring, though, is it. A couple of orange sweet potato (OSP) studies are included in the review. As I said in a post a couple of days back on a recent paper on OSP, which came too late for this review, evaluation of nutritional and health impacts is hard. Perhaps the new Bioversity publication “Improving nutrition with agricultural biodiversity” will help? It might with project design, but its section on evaluation doesn’t seem particularly detailed, and there’s nothing on impact assessment. Maybe that’s to come? Hopefully someone from Bioversity will tell us.

November 30, 2011November 30, 2011

The business of bananas and apples

Quite by chance, two items that give insights into the backstory behind the No. 1 and No. 2 fruits in the world.

The always intriguing Nicola Twilley takes her class (Artificial Cryosphere) on a tour of New York’s biggest banana handler. Sure, we all know that the banana is the industrial fruit par excellence, but I guarantee Nicola’s report will open your eyes. And give you a million conversation stoppers, should you ever need them. Did you know, for example, that a recently gassed banana ripening room smells “like a wine-soaked carpet, the morning after”?

Next up, the patented, “managed variety” apple SweeTango®. I heard an interview with journalist John Seabrook at NPR, although unfortunately the New Yorker article that got him invited to talk about SweeTango® in the first place is not available for free. Among several fascinating elements in the story, I was struck by the control that the University of Minnesota is exercising over SweeTango®, which has its own website. Farmers cannot just sell direct to supermarkets or wholesalers. They have to sell back to a consortium established by the University, which aims to keep quality standards high. I wonder how much the University will make on the deal. I also wonder whether, like some of the DOC wines here, excess apples might be found for sale, unlabeled, at the side of a Minnesota county road. And it looks like there’s a lot more to Seabrook’s article than SweeTango®, about apples and apple breeding in general.

November 30, 2011

Frank Bisby

I was very sorry to hear of the death of Frank Bisby of the University of Reading on 25 October. Prof. Bisby was a renowned plant systematist who very early on saw the potential of databases in advancing the taxonomic project, and devoted his career to see that promise fulfilled. He was an ardent conservationist, for example participating in numerous legume genetic resources collecting expeditions. ¹ He will be much missed.

November 29, 2011December 5, 2016

Searching British newspapers for agrobiodiversity now virtually possible

The British Newspaper Archive is potentially a great resource for research into agricultural biodiversity in the past.

We have scanned millions of pages of historical newspapers and made them available online for the first time ever.

Search millions of articles by keyword, name, location, date or title and watch your results appear in an instant.

I did a search on the apple variety Pearmain and got 44 hits from 1753 to 1944.

So, for example, the Caledonian Mercury has a classified on Monday 1 January 1753 which says:

…glifh Apples, fuch as Nonpareis, Holland Pippens, Royal Rennets, Kentilh Pippens, Pearmains, and Rulfets, inno IcfsQuantity than a Box containing two bufhels; alfo very Hne and large Chcfhire Cheefe, from a 200 Pound-weight and do^tovard, the beft Gl…

Alas, if you want any more than that, you have to pay, and rather steeply too. Pity.

LATER: All the more so as Google seems to have discontinued its Timeline feature in News Archive search. Which I hadn’t noticed and I’m quite sad about now.

November 28, 2011November 25, 2011

Brainfood: OSP adoption, Milk quality, Passport data quality, Historical collections, Sweet potato domestication, African veggies, Baobab diversity and domestication, Cassava diversity, Strawberry breeding, Barley GWA, Pest symbionts, Maize diversity and climate change

A large-scale intervention to introduce orange sweet potato in rural Mozambique increases vitamin A intakes among children and women. Just 1 year of training worked just as well as a higher intensity intervention (3 years) in increasing OSP and vitamin A intake by younger children, older children and women, and decreasing prevalence of inadequate vitamin A intakes. OSP represented about half of all sweet potatoes consumed so I guess there was not complete replacement of local varieties.
Composition of milk from minor dairy animals and buffalo breeds: a biodiversity perspective. There are significant interbreed and inter-species differences. Dromedary milk is closest to cow milk, mare and donkey milk maybe the healthiest, but moose milk is the one I’d like to try.
Quality indicators for passport data in ex situ genebanks. That would be the genebanks in Eurisco. Verdict: not bad, but could do better. Most variation in quality is among institutes.
Exploring the population genetics of genebank and historical landrace varieties. Old samples of dead seeds of 4 crops in Swedish museum jars more genetically variable than genebank accessions, but it’s not the genebank’s fault. And at least their seeds are still alive. Also no genetic correspondence between geographically matched museum and genebank samples.
Combining chloroplast and nuclear microsatellites to investigate origin and dispersal of New World sweet potato landraces. Two areas of domestication, probably from a single wild progenitor species: lowland NW South America and lowland Central America/Caribbean. Genetic differences between these 2 genepools not accompanied by morphological differences, but then again nobody’s looked properly, and the current descriptors are useless anyway.
The significance of African vegetables in ensuring food security for South Africa’s rural poor. Their huge potential is being thwarted by evil extensionists. Ok, but don’t we need to move beyond that?
Comparative study on baobab fruit morphological variation between western and south-eastern Africa: opportunities for domestication. Hang on a minute, aren’t there a million factsheets about all this?
Marriage exchanges, seed exchanges, and the dynamics of manioc diversity. Kinship structures determine cassava diversity patterns in Gabon. Matrilineal societies have more diversity.
Interspecific hybridization of diploids and octoploids in strawberry. You get pentaploid and tetraploid plants.
Genome wide association analyses for drought tolerance related traits in barley (Hordeum vulgare L.). Ok, deep breath. Over 200 accessions, both wild and cultivated, from 30 countries, so quite variable, but also structured. There were some QTLs that differed between dry and wet sites, but they didn’t explain much phenotypic variation, and they couldn’t be related to previous work. So GWA not much use, probably because of population structure. But couldn’t that have been predicted? And isn’t it possible to do something about structure in the analysis?
Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Mostly proteobacteria. So my question is, could somehow attacking the symbionts form the basis of a pest management strategy?
Projecting the effects of climate change on the distribution of maize races and their wild relatives in Mexico. Many races and wild relatives are predicted to shift in geographic distribution. Unless of course agronomy intervenes. Teocinte taxa should be collected.