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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.

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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.

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Shock horror! Natural selection true!

Just fancy that. A survey of farmers and their weeds has come up with some fascinating results.

Bill Johnson, a Purdue University associate professor of weed science, said farmers who plant Roundup Ready crops and spray Roundup or glyphosate-based herbicides almost exclusively are finding that weeds have developed resistance. It is only a matter of time, Johnson said, before there are so many resistant weeds that the use of glyphosate products would become much less effective in some places.

“We have weeds that have developed resistance, including giant ragweed, which is one of the weeds that drove the adoption of Roundup,” Johnson said. “It’s a pretty major issue in the Eastern Corn Belt. That weed can cause up to 100 percent yield loss.”

So, let me get this straight. You repeatedly subject a living, reproducing organism to a particular environmental stress, and it evolves so as to adapt to that stress? Well, I’ll be.

The best part:

“Monsanto, the maker of Roundup, funded the survey. … [T]he next step is studying the differences among management strategies in grower fields to see which will slow the build-up of glyphosate resistance.”

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“Warty vegetable comes to the rescue”

It looks like a wart-covered zucchini and has an equally unappetising name, but experts say it could help rescue the world’s population from malnutrition and disease.

You can’t always trust a journalist to get it absolutely right, but the above quote does seem to be heaping the manure on just a bit too high. The new boss of the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center is in Australia talking up his book, which includes the bitter gourd or bitter melon, Momordica charantia. He’s full of sensible advice to Australians, to whit:

“The take-home message for Australians is to eat as many varied vegetables as you can – different colours, orange, green – and make sure you have them in balance with the rest of the diet. … cut back on some of the meat consumption, have less carbohydrates and increase the fruit and vegetable intake, then you will live a longer and healthier life”.

But what kind of a lede would that make?

Thanks Dirk for the tip.