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New insights into barley domestication

We asked one of the co-authors, Ian Dawson, who’s an old friend, to briefly summarize for us a paper just out in New Phytologist on the domestication of barley. Here is his contribution. Thanks a lot, Ian, and keep ’em coming…

ResearchBlogging.orgThe power of new technologies to explore crop evolution is illustrated by a just released paper by Russell and co-workers 1 that explores barley domestication in the Fertile Crescent, a key region in the development of farming. From assessing a collection of more than 1,000 genetically mapped, genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in geographically-matched landrace and wild barley accessions from Jordan and Syria, genetic contact between the two categories was evident, suggesting hybridisation may be a mechanism for the continued adaptation of landraces in the region under climate change. In addition, statistically significant chromosome-level differences in diversity between barley types were observed around genes known to be involved in the evolution of cultivars, indicating regions of the genome that may be subject to selection and therefore of interest in future crop breeding. For example, a significant reduction in diversity in landrace barley –- which suggests a genetic bottleneck during domestication –- was observed around the brittle rachis genes, recessive characters which result in grains remaining longer on plants after maturation, allowing efficient harvest of cultivated compared to wild barley. Jordan and southern Syria, compared to the north of Syria, was supported by SNP data as a more likely origin of domesticated barley, suggesting limited locations for the original development of the cultivated crop. Such studies, which exploit novel and rapidly developing genotyping methods, provide great scope for also exploring the evolution of other crops of both historical and current importance, especially when combined with matched geographic sampling of wild and cultivated material.

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China’s Germplasm Bank of Wild Species gets a visit

GoKunming, which seems to be a semi-official English-language site about the capital and largest city of Yunnan Province in southwestern China, has a feature today on the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species (中国西南野生生物种质资源库) at the Kunming Institute of Botany. It’s a nice write-up, although we would take issue with parts of the following statement:

Why is cooperation between the world’s seedbanks important? Staff at Kunming’s seedbank told us that during the recent social upheaval in Egypt, the country’s seedbank suffered looting (for the jars, not the seeds), which led to the destruction of many valuable specimens. Luckily, the seedbank had sent backup specimens to its partners abroad.

Though there has been extensive damage to equipment, I don’t think any evidence has been presented of the looting of jars from the Egyptian Deserts Genebank, if that is indeed the one referred to, or of the destruction of specimens, valuable or otherwise. And of course, although some accessions stored in that genebank were in fact duplicated, in particular at Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, not all were. But it is nice to see the point about cooperation among genebanks made so clearly.

Just for completeness, the national crop, as opposed to wild species, genebank of China is in Beijing (left). China has not yet ratified the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

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Religion, diet and nutrition

We tend not to set too much store by religion around these parts, so a letter in response  2 to The Economist’s recent pieces on nutrition piqued our interest. It read, in part:

In the March issue of their magazine, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints reported on a food initiative which has taught many members to garden, even in small, urban spaces, and with whatever containers they can find. Started in 2009, these people have gone on to teach others in their communities how to increase their nutritional intake—and self-reliance—with just seeds, soil and sunlight.

Let me Google that for you. Better yet, having Googled it, let me fillet out the article in question and make it available all on its own. Turns out that not only are Mormons keen on urban and container gardening for diversity and nutrition, they’ve been so for quite a while. A former US secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, was President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and set out a very familiar vision of how to prepare for the Days of Tribulation:

Get together with others and seek permission to use a vacant lot for a garden, or rent a plot of ground and grow your gardens. Some elders quorums have done this as a quorum, and all who have participated have reaped the benefits of a vegetable and fruit harvest and the blessings of cooperation and family involvement. Many families have dug up lawn space for gardens.

That sounds like a modern manifesto to me. Of course, there’s an appeal to authority too:

President Brigham Young said, “If you are without bread, how much wisdom can you boast, and of what real utility are your talents, if you cannot procure for yourselves and save against a day of scarcity those substances designed to sustain your natural lives?”

One to ponder. Meanwhile, I wonder whether those members of the Mormon faith who heeded their presidents’ advice saw any impact on their nutrition?

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A coconut impostor unmasked

Are you one of those that gets upset when a film-maker, say, tries to get one part of the world to stand in for another without giving a thought to the possibility that the respective floras might be entirely different? I’m afraid I am, and many a movie supposedly set in Africa, for example, has been spoiled for me when I realized, by looking at the plants, that it was filmed in Hawaii or Costa Rica.

Roland Bourdeix has the same problem, if the recent exchange on the Cococnut Google Group is anything to go by.

Roland received the following postcard from Guadeloupe.

Fair enough for most people, but being the coconut expert he is, Roland immediately realized that the photograph depicted Tahiti Red Dwarf (also called Rangiroa Red Dwarf or Haari Papua). Problem is, that variety is not recorded from Guadeloupe. So, either it has been very recently introduced, or, more probably, according to Roland, the postcard company simply used a picture of a coconut from another country, perhaps French Polynesia, and passed it off as being from Guadeloupe. And nearly got away with it…