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Featured: Taro leaf blight
Afiniki Bawa Zarafi remains concerned about taro leaf blight:
Please what has been the finding of CABI/ Global plant clinic in respect to this coocyam leaf blight/ taro leaf blight? I am also interested in the result /findings of other scientists working on this disease.
And he’s right. More than a year ago in a comment to the same post Zachee Ngoko promised:
More information will come out as soon as available. Stay tuned!
Afiniki, and the rest of us, are still tuned. So what’s the news?
Brainfood: Indian domestication, Canna domestication, Indigenous knowledge, Sunflower history, Diets and diversity, Immature grains
- Finding Plant Domestication in the Indian Subcontinent. Maybe five independent centers of domestication, but maybe not. It’s complicated.
- The Origin of Southeastern Asian Triploid Edible Canna (Canna discolor Lindl.) Revealed by Molecular Cytogenetical Study. It’s simple. C. indica var. indica and C. plurituberosa.
- Diversity of Plant Knowledge as an Adaptive Asset: A Case Study with Standing Rock Elders. You’d be amazed what they know. It’s diverse.
- Morphometric Analysis of Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) Achenes from Mexico and Eastern North America. It’s interesting. Size is a better descriptor than computerized shape analysis.
- A Systematic Review on the Contributions of Edible Plant and Animal Biodiversity to Human Diets. It’s lacking; there isn’t nearly as much good evidence as you might expect.
- Experimental approaches to understanding variation in grain size in Panicum miliaceum (broomcorn millet) and its relevance for interpreting archaeobotanical assemblages. It’s misleading. You need to make allowances for immature grains.
Don’t forget the open Mendeley group for the papers we link to here.
Banana threat averted? Not quite yet
Strange news from Scidev.net, which reports that:
[R]esults of a field study in Davao City, on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, show that two Cavendish varieties are highly resistant to Panama disease.
These varieties, he said, were produced in Taiwan by selecting improved mutants from the Cavendish variety.
Why strange? For one thing, because Cavendish bananas have long been resistant to Panama disease. That’s why they are so widespread, because they replaced Gros Michel, the previous dominant variety, which was wiped out commercially by Panama disease in the 1950s and 1960s.
To give credit, Scidev.net explains that the threat is a new form of Panama disease, which is caused by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum, known as Tropical Race 4. Cavendish was resistant to race 1 of Fusarium wilt, to which Gros Michel was susceptible. Tropical Race 4 attacks Cavendish too. But not, according to the report, all Cavendish plants. Some clones, like those ones from Taiwan, are showing resistance.
Strange too because the thrust of the Scidev.net piece is that Filipino scientists are calling on the government to establish a National Research, Development and Extension Center for Banana. But hang on. Tropical Race 4 is a global menace. The very fact that Taiwanese selections are showing promise on Mindanao in the Philippines should give pause.
Wouldn’t it be much more efficient for all governments in the region and beyond to contribute to a global effort? The big banana concerns were to some extent to blame for the demise of Gros Michel and the march of Panama disease, as they abandoned infected plantations and brought new areas into cultivation until there was nowhere left to run and they had to switch. This time around, they could support a globally co-ordinated effort to find and distribute more resistant varieties.
Aggregating taxon data online
At first I just wanted to Nibble it. “Alien plants in urban nature reserves: from red-list species to future invaders?” 1 looks at the effect of invasive plant species on the flora of 48 protected areas in the city of Prague. I was going to ask how many crop wild relatives are to be found in those reserves and leave it at that. Oh, ok maybe also make a throwaway comment along the lines of: In other news, Prague has 48 nature reserves. But I think it may be worth additionally pointing out an interesting feature that comes from publishing in the free-access journal NeoBiota. If you click on any of the taxon names in the HTML version of the paper you get a so-called PENSOFT Taxon Profile. What that seems to do is aggregate in a really attractive way a whole bunch of content on the species in question from everything from GBIF to Wikipedia to Google Scholar. You can create your own taxon profile if a species you really want to know about isn’t named in the paper you’re looking at. Compare to how the Crop Wild Relatives Portal does it. Good and less good things in both, I suppose. I like the way PENSOFT actually gives you the GBIF map and the images, plus also gene sequence references. But the Portal includes SINGER, Eurisco and GRIN searches. 2 And not a factsheet in sight.