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If they can do it in LA, why not in Kibera?

I’m gobsmacked by something that’s happening in Los Angeles. Here’s the idea:

Document your food purchases. Every 2 weeks, we’ll be asking you to record your purchases of a different food type. We’ll send you an email to let you know what it is. So, during the fortnight that the food type is bananas, every time you buy a banana, whether you’re at the supermarket, filling up at a petrol station, or grabbing breakfast to go at a coffee shop, we want you to whip out your phone, open Foodprint LA: Bananas in Kullect, 1 take a quick photo of your banana(s), enter the price, choose from a list of vendors, and contribute your individual banana purchase data to help create a bigger picture of the Los Angeles banana-scape. Repeat step 3 as many times as you buy bananas during that two-week banana-data Kullection.

Why?

We’ll take the data (anonymised, of course), analyse it for patterns and insights, and create data visualisations — infographics, maps, and charts — that we can share with everyone who wants to understand the city’s foodscape a little bit better.

The resulting data won’t replace a rigorous foodshed study in the city’s planning process, of course. Nonetheless, we think that crowd-sourcing the data-gathering process and then mining the resulting information to tell stories and ask new questions will be a fun way to build awareness and encourage conversation about where the Los Angeles’ food actually comes from.

That has to be doable in Kibera, or anywhere that people are struggling to access good food. And think of the insights. My head is spinning …

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Crop Wild Relatives video

So I was snooping around on Vimeo and I found this video clip from Diverseeds, featuring Hanan Sela, an Israeli plant scientist, talking about cereal wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent. We’ve mentioned the DVD before; but we didn’t link to a clip.

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Featured: QTLs for dormancy

Jacob answers Luigi’s question about a contrast that doesn’t appear to be one thusly:

The contrast is:
Variation for seed dormancy controlled by one QTL in one population and two QTLs in the other (of which one is different from the first population).

versus

Variation for flowering time controlled by the same QTL in both populations.

One does rather wish the authors or editor would pipe up too.

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Australian interest in Food Security

The Crawford Fund in Australia supports a lot of good work on agricultural biodiversity and more sustainable agriculture, but its website is a bugger. No RSS feed. And sometimes no way to link to an interesting story. Or at least, none that I can see. Nothing for it but a spot of copy and paste.

There has been a renewed focus on food security in the media of late with a range of national and metropolitan papers focusing on the topic. And the most recent AusAID “Focus” magazine is themed on food and food security, with an article by The Crawford Fund focusing on the rewards of research. Following a Crawford Fund ‘seeing is believing’ visit to Vietnam, ABC TV Landline producer Kerry Straight has been working on a special feature for the program on food security, which Crawford Fund, ACIAR and CSIRO has been assisting with through this year. The feature has now gone to air focusing on a broad range of issues related to food security from both the developing country and Australian perspectives. The feature includes a range of speakers who were part of the Crawford Fund’s State Parliamentary Conference in Brisbane in April this year. In late June, the 35min feature went to air on Landline on “The Future of Food” including Kanayo Nwanze, Julian Cribb, Rick Roush, Michael D’Occhio, Peter Carberry and others. The story can be found here. The feature provides a good overview of the complexity of the food security issue, stressing the importance of R&D. Visits to East Africa and to Aceh are currently being supported as the next Crawford Fund ‘seeing is believing’ visits.

I love the idea of “seeing is believing” tours.

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Variation in seed dormancy within populations

I asked Robin Probert at the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew to comment on the recent paper “Variation in seed dormancy quantitative trait loci in Arabidopsis thaliana originating from one site.” Here’s the abstract:

A Quantitative Trait Locus (QTL) analysis was performed using two novel Recombinant Inbred Line (RIL) populations, derived from the progeny between two Arabidopsis thaliana genotypes collected at the same site in Kyoto (Japan) crossed with the reference laboratory strain Landsberg erecta (Ler). We used these two RIL populations to determine the genetic basis of seed dormancy and flowering time, which are assumed to be the main traits controlling life history variation in Arabidopsis. The analysis revealed quantitative variation for seed dormancy that is associated with allelic variation at the seed dormancy QTL DOG1 (for Delay Of Germination 1) in one population and at DOG6 in both. These DOG QTL have been previously identified using mapping populations derived from accessions collected at different sites around the world. Genetic variation within a population may enhance its ability to respond accurately to variation within and between seasons. In contrast, variation for flowering time, which also segregated within each mapping population, is mainly governed by the same QTL.

And here’s what Robin had to say:

Sufficient genetic variation for seed dormancy in single populations, especially annuals, is not surprising and we found this many years ago when we were working on Ranunculus sceleratus. 2 In those days we didn’t have the molecular tools now available but is was very clear that individual genotypes selected from single populations had the ability to behave as winter or summer annuals. Nevertheless, there are countless examples in the literature that demonstrate that germination and dormancy are highly adapted to local climate. I guess what the recent papers reveal is that hidden within those striking patterns of adaptation is sufficient genetic variation to cope with climate variation. Whether this will be enough to cope with the scale and rapidity of climate change is another matter. Time will tell.

Indeed it will. While we wait, can anyone explain that “In contrast…” at the end of the abstract?