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Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter: an update

We took advantage of a recent meeting to ask Theo van Hintum, one of the people behind efforts to breathe new life into Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter about the patient’s prognosis. He said that, encouraged by the support from the community, Robert Koebner, the other guy behind the initiative, and he had tried several donors, asking for $25,000 a year for three years. Answers ranged from “no” to no answer yet, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Theo and Robert are beginning to be a bit fed up. The demand is there; what is missing is a little financial support.

We discussed three possible solutions, all of which could involve you, our readers.

Maybe $25,000 a year for three years is too little. Instead of going to the usual suspects, who put PGRN in intensive care in the first place, what if a proposal went to an individual or foundation interested in agriculture, capacity building, education and empowerment? Might they entertain a grant of $100,000 a year for three years, which would enable PGRN to hire a dedicated administrator? Of course, none of us know of such a foundation or individual. Do you?

Someone suggested Kickstarter as a source of investors. That remains a possibility; does anyone have any experience with it? Alternatively, what about kickstarting PGRN ourselves. Theo says they need $25000 a year for three years. That’s only $1000 each for 75 of us who might be able to afford it, and less if more. I will if you will.

In the end PGRN must be self-supporting and not reliant on grants and whims. Would something like Google Adwords offer a reasonable income stream? It could be worth a try, in conjunction with either of the two pump-priming investments outlined above. If all the back-issues could be made available on one effective website, I reckon there’s a good chance that there would be enough traffic … but what do I know?

Theo said that he and Robert want to go ahead only if they can secure three years of funding, “to see whether it can be a success, and then maybe the proper organizations to handle the newsletter will want it back”.

“How do you define success?”

“Visitors, submissions, feedback; the donors will judge.”

I disagree. Donors have been known to reverse their judgments. The best measure of success will be if PGRN is sustainably and independently supported. Can we do that?

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Considering crop wild relatives anew

Our friend Andy Jarvis is suffering the pains of the Villa Bellagio on scuzzy Lake Como as his contribution to a rethinking of the role of crop wild relatives in adapting to climate change. You can read his impressions (and see the presentation he unleashed on an unsuspecting audience) at his team’s blog.

Bottom lines:

  • Crop wild relatives are increasingly important.
  • Crop wild relatives are increasingly usable, and hence increasingly in demand.
  • Crop wild relatives are increasingly threatened.
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Featured: Fish too

Rahul Goswami shares the history of fishing:

You know, on the west coast of India they wouldn’t go out to fish during the monsoon. Not because those amazing catamarans (the Malayali-origin word is ‘kattumaram’, more or less) can’t ride the big waves, but because the fish need time to breed.

There’s more, in the context of avoiding industrial meat … and fish is a meat, no?

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Cowpea B301’s back story

Via Kate Gold at RBG Kew comes Charlie Riches‘ account of how he found the Striga-resistant cowpea B301 and how it came to IITA.

Here is the story of B301 — serendipity perhaps but not such a random find as the previous blog entries suggest!

If we think about origin and diversity in cowpea there should be no surprise to find Striga gesnerioides resistance in a landrace from Botswana — B301 is not the only one. I collected the seed in 1981, if my memory serves from the field of a farmer called Batleng near of the village of Kopong just a few miles from the Agricultural Research Station at Sebele. 1 At that time I was starting on my quest for resistance to the root parasite Alectra vogelii. 2 My hypothesis was that resistance may be available among the many landraces grown by farmers on fields infested by A. vogelii. I had observed that while landraces often had few parasites, fields of the introduced cultivar Blackeye would be thick with A. vogelii. So as I travelled around the villages where I was doing various agronomic trials with farmers I looked out for cowpea landrace plants that had no parasite stems growing near to them or maybe just one among stands of cowpea where there were otherwise many emerged A. vogelii.

During the 1981 harvest I collected 30 or 40 accessions that eventually were contributed to the Botswana Cowpea collection — they were all characterised and listed in the Botswana Cowpea Catalogue produced by colleagues at Sebele. I think my copy is in the attic! My collections were a pod or two from single plants so initially I had to multiply seed. Then I did a pot trial with 66 exotic and local lines, including 39 of my single plant selections, growing the plants in A. vogelii infested soil. This indicated possible resistance; i.e, no parasite attachments could be found on the roots washed from pots, in B301, B319 and B359. I reported this finding and subsequent confirmation trials at the 4th International Symposium on Parasitic Flowering Plants in Marburg. (Riches C. 1987. The Identification of Resistance to Alectra vogelii in Cowpea. pages 701-708 of the Proceedings).

Subsequently I screened 358 local accessions and found a further 12 with no emerged parasite stems. I continued working with a number of landraces that supported no or very few A. vogelii. In the end B359 proved to be the best source of resistance in pots and the field — B301 did sometimes allow the odd parasite stem to develop.

Anyway to continue the story! While I was working in Botswana I was in contact with Chris Parker, who had been working on Striga for many years at the Weed Research Organisation [near Oxford in the UK] (closed down in 1986). He visited Botswana to discuss my work and it made sense to us to check out if my A. vogelii-resistant materials were also useful for S. gesnerioides. By this time Chris was working at Long Ashton Research Station (now also closed!) and with Tess Polniaszek demonstrated that B301 showed resistance to Striga populations from Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Niger and Mali — the first line to have this multi-strain resistance (Parker, C. and Polniaszek, T.I. 1990. Parasitism of cowpea by Striga gesnerioides: variation in virulence and discovery of a new source of host resistance. Annals of Applied Biology, 116: 305-311). I provided all my Botswana accessions to B.B. Singh at IITA and the rest is history.

B301 is not the only line to provide dual parasite resistance in West Africa; there are now a number of others e.g. IT81D 849. Because there are a number of strains of A. vogelii, cowpea lines that are resistant in West Africa are not always so in East and Southern Africa. There is currently a group working in Malawi and Tanzania, funded by Collaborative Crop Research Program of the McKnight Foundation, that is developing resistant lines for southern Africa. B301 is being used as one parent in a back-cross breeding program. So after nearly 30 years the genes are on their way home!

What this story shows is the importance of collaboration and for researchers to share their findings.

Returning to the original comments in the blog I do not think it curious at all that resistance to S. gesnerioides can be found in Botswana where this species is very common but does not parasitise cowpea. As migrations and trade took cowpea across the continent from West Africa some landraces will probably have been taken from areas of West Africa infested by S. gesnerioides. 3

A more interesting question is why strains of Striga that are capable of attacking cowpea have not been disseminated from West to East and Southern Africa on cowpea seed! In these regions there are a number of distinct, host specific, morphotypic variants mainly on wild legumes and occasionally tobacco but never cowpea (see Ralston, Riches & Musselman, 1997. Morphology and hosts of three Striga species in Botswana. Adansonia 2, 195-215). 4

Thanks so much to Charles Riches for this account. Gotta love the interwebs.