Posts

Posted on

Upstream blast

ResearchBlogging.org Blast is one of the worst rice diseases. I believe that, thanks to the breeders, most modern varieties have decent levels of resistance. After all, they can be used in varietal mixtures to protect traditional glutinous rice varieties from blast. 1 Unfortunately, much of this resistance is not durable, because the pathogen overcomes it with time.

For a long time, durable resistance has been known to exist in some Japanese varieties. But these varieties have not been useful for resistance breeding, as the resistant parent also brought along undesired characteristics: the offspring always had poor eating quality.

Shuichi Fukuoka and colleagues have found out why. They report in Science 2 that it is because of a tight genetic linkage. Resistance is conferred by the Pi21 locus, and:

The eating quality of plants carrying the elite cultivar’s chromosomal sequence from a point less than 2.4 kb downstream of the Pi21 locus was equivalent to that of the elite cultivar, and the plants showed a high level of blast resistance. In contrast, plants carrying the donor chromosomal sequence up to 37 kb downstream of the Pi21 locus showed inferior eating quality.

By crossing in just the right bit of the chromosome, and making sure that the neighboring areas do not tag along, resistance can now be transferred, without spoiling the taste.

Posted on

Featured: Bio-geekery

A major row breaks out over the Church of the Bio-Geek.

tai haku gets in an early jab:

I’ll be honest and admit I found the glass flowers slightly underwhelming.

Mary parries:

That’s funny, that’s pretty much how I felt about the mammal room. It smelled of formaldehyde, and was the sort of standard and underwhelming collection of roadkill under glass that I did expect.

tai haku comes back for more:

The mammal room was “interesting”. … I suspect the place is probably quite tight for funds – I’d love to have access to that collection and a huge dollop of cash to make the place over, it has the makings of a fabulous facility.

And there we leave them. What’s your view?

Posted on

The Hungarian Agricultural Museum

So there’s a Hungarian Agricultural Museum in Budapest.

On display are implements of rural handicraft and machines for lightening the load of the farmer, documents about the raising of animals (especially horses, cattle, sheep and pigs), as well as forestry, hunting (there is a fine collection of trophies) and fishing.

Actually it’s supposed to be the “biggest museum of agriculture in Europe.” I personally find that “fine collection of trophies” in the Hall of Hunting ever-so-slightly creepy, but the rest of the museum looks like it might be quite interesting, at least in parts. A little difficult to tell as most of the website is only in Hungarian. Anyone out there been to see it? Via.

Posted on

Herbaria get it together

Looks like the Paris herbarium (P, to taxonomy geeks), one of the largest in the world at 8,000,000 specimens, is finally sorting itself out. That’s really good news, because Paris is also perhaps the most frustrating herbarium in the world, due to the backlog in processing specimens and the generally sub-par conditions. All that’s going to change.

Once work moving and reclassifying the herbarium is complete, it will also be the world’s largest collection of plant specimens available on the internet. “We shall have 8m images, with a photograph of each plate on the museum’s website,” says the senior curator Jean-Michel Guiraud.

But I was particularly intrigued by this little throwaway final paragraph in the Guardian piece on the catch-up project. 3

International collaboration is under way to avoid duplication between the world’s top herbaria: primarily Kew Gardens and the Missouri Botanical Gardens, the two largest alongside Paris, but also smaller collections belonging to natural history museums or botanical gardens in London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Washington and New York.

I need to find out more about what this really means. You certainly don’t want to avoid duplication of specimens entirely, for safety reasons. Maybe it’s more a question of exchanging information on holdings so that at least herbaria know the extent of duplication. Anyway, I want to know how they’ll do it. Because it will be a cold day in genebank database hell before “international collaboration” will be able to “avoid duplication” in the world’s top genebanks.

Posted on

Make it so!

You have spoken, and by a narrow margin, you wanted a few more full items on the home page. So be it, five instead of three. We’ll let that settle down before we reassess. Unless there’s something you really, really would like us to change.