A CIMMYT staff member at work in the maize active collection in the Wellhausen-Anderson Plant Genetic Resources Center. CIMMYT’s germplasm bank contains around 28,000 unique samples of maize seed—including more than 24,000 farmer landraces; traditional, locally-adapted varieties that are rich in diversity—and 140,000 of wheat, including related species for both crops. The bank both conserves this diversity and makes it available as a resource for breeding. The active collection for meeting requests is kept at -3 °C, while the duplicate base collection for long-term storage is at -18 °C. Maize seed is stored in plastic jars, while aluminium envelopes are used for smaller wheat seed, and a sophisticated barcode system enables staff to keep track of the thousands of accessions. “Disaster proof” features of the bank include thick concrete walls and back-up power systems.
Photo credit: Xochiquetzal Fonseca/CIMMYT.
Genebanks at IBC18
So apparently, according to various tweets, Prof. David Mabberley made an impassioned plea for crop wild relatives and genebanks during a panel discussion at the International Botanical Congress in Melbourne earlier today. Will try to find out more.
Gender inequity in agroforestry seed supply
You may remember that in last this week’s Brainfood we linked to a paper which looked at agroforestry input supply systems, and recommended a commercial, decentralized model for getting high quality tree seeds to smallholders. Now I’ve come across “Gender and agroforestry in Africa: a review of women’s participation.” The bottom line — not surprisingly, alas — is that women’s participation tends to be lower in enterprises in which there’s more money at stake. But this second paper only looked at the outputs, not the inputs. It would be interesting to know whether women tend to be edged out of commercial tree seed supply enterprises too. I suspect they do, which suggests that following the recommendation of the first paper for tree seed supply systems might result in even more pronounced gender inequity. So what could be done about it? Both papers include ICRAF staff as co-authors, though there’s no overlap. Maybe some of them have already thought about this and might like to comment here.
Taro leaf blight confirmed in Nigeria
We’ve blogged a few times about the emerging threat of taro leaf blight in West Africa, and what could be done about it. In case anyone was still in doubt about this threat, here comes the science.
The sequence analysis, morphological characteristics, and pathogenicity test confirmed the taro leaf blight pathogen as P. colocasiae. There are previous reports of occurrence of taro blight-like disease attributed to P. colocasiae in Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea (1), and more recently in Cameroon, but comprehensive details on pathogen or disease are not available. To our knowledge, this is the first confirmed record in Nigeria of P. colocasiae causing taro blight. This disease poses a serious threat to the production and biodiversity of this important food crop. Urgent interventions are necessary to halt this emerging epidemic in West and Central Africa.
One possible intervention of course, is introducing resistant varieties, and I believe some of the resistant material from various South Pacific breeding programmes has now arrived at IITA from the in vitro genebank at SPC’s Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees.
The history of the effort to breed resistant varieties is described in a recent ACIAR publication. Grahame Jackson, who was involved in the early stages of that work, had this to say about the article in a recent exchange of emails:
Interesting article; but it does not ask the hard, and perhaps more interesting questions: why did it take 5 years before there was a concerted effort to take the only route possible to solve the taro blight problem — to breed for resistance? … How many regional meetings were there over 5 years, until the start of TaroGen; how much money was wasted until a concerted effort was made to tackle the problem? … And in the meantime the Samoa farmers had solved their food insecurity: they had diversified into Alocasia, cassava, breadfruit, and rice. … More recently, another donor said of the disastrous epiphytotic of taro leaf blight in West Africa: “We get half a dozen emails a week describing some outbreak or other, mostly exaggerated. And anyway we can’t do anything until the countries ask.”
Shouldn’t be long now…
Featured: Genetic erosion
Dave Wood has a question about genetic erosion in US apple varieties:
How many did they have in 1492?