Are you worried that an organic garden on the White House grounds might cause some Americans to start eating a wide variety of chemical-free, locally grown produce? The Mid America CropLife Association, a lobbying group for agribusinesses giants, is.
Asian cattle
Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology gives an overview of the cattle of Asia, with pictures. A couple of take home messages, for me. One is that the domestication of various bovids is pretty complex, with hybrids, feral forms, wild relatives and all combinations thereof in existence. The other is this conversation-stopping tidbit: “domestic cattle don’t need to shiver or employ other thermoregulatory tricks even in temperatures approaching -20° C”. Why not? Go read Darren’s post, and then reconsider the “fleshy dewlaps, tall dorsal ridges and other structures” that are typical of tropical types.
Melaku Worede speaks
And this is what the veteran crop conservationist says:
Gene banks like the SADC gene bank, the Svalbard gene bank, and many others, focus only on collecting and preserving. How can you think you are conserving diversity when the very source upon which the seeds depend is not included? You can capture only so much, and in 100 years it will be useless because the planet will have changed. Perhaps you will be able to incorporate some genetic material into varieties and release them, but who is going to benefit from that? That is the big question.
I know what he means. You need to conserve the process, as well as the product. But I have another big question. If the world — read the climate — is changing as fast as many now fear, don’t you need the insurance policy that genebanks provide all the more?
The Future of Plant Genetic Resources
The Future of Plant Genetic Resources is a one-day meeting to be held on 14 May 2009 at the Linnean Society in the heart of London’s fashionable West End. The meeting honours Jack Hawkes, Past President of the LinnSoc, who
devoted his long and illustrious career to the study of plant genetic resources. His meeting with the Russian plant geneticist Nicolai Vavilov in St. Petersburg in 1938 was in his own words “an experience that changed my life”; working with Jack was an experience that changed the lives of many of today’s plant breeders. Jack’s work on potatoes and their wild relatives was at the centre of a broad interest in the conservation and utilization of plant genetic resources, and his vision and legacy are widely celebrated – he has been called “the father of germplasm banks”. In this day meeting we will honour Jack and his many contributions by examining the future of plant genetic resources in today’s scientific setting.
There’s a pretty stellar line-up of speakers, and of course we’d be interested in a report, if you go.
GMO introgression risk mapped
Bioversity International’s Gene Flow Risk Assessment of Genetically Engineered Crops project, funded by GTZ and realized in collaboration with CIAT and Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia), has got (some of) its products out. The project focused on the “likelihood of gene flow and introgression to crop wild relatives (CWR) and other domesticated species.” A book is coming, but you can see the risk maps for a number of crops online now. And there’s also a bibliography.
LATER: Jeremy points out, correctly, that “see” in the last sentence above is a bit of an overstatement. You need to do a bit more work than is perhaps implied.