• The UK is fully on board for Rio+20 to “prioritize sustainable agriculture”.
• Maybe they saw ILRI’s number on mixed crops and livestock?
• The Japanese say that restoring the surrounding ecosystem is what restored rice production after last year’s tsunami. So they will support the UK?
• Amateur trials genebank’s asparagus varieties. I got a great bean that way.
• AoBblog catches up with the pigeonpea priority problem.
• “‘We now know exactly what we need to do to fix the broken tomato,’ said Harry Klee of the University of Florida.” You couldn’t make this science knows how stuff up.
• A new use for liquorice: treating type 2 diabetes.
• Something is eating the palms of Antigua, including the coconut palms. I’m no expert, but the symptoms look a lot like the work of the red palm weevil, our Roman palm disaster.

Jeremy’s recent piece of detective work with the current edition of the Garden Seed Inventory, coming hot on the heels of my own piece on how diversity in French wheat has changed during the past hundred years, reminded me of a post of ours a couple of years back that could now bear revisiting. It was about a paper that had re-analyzed historical data from vegetable seed catalogues old and new to suggest that maybe the metanarrative of genetic erosion had been overdone:

If the meaning of diversity is linked to the survival of ancient varieties, then the lessons of the twentieth century are grim. If it refers instead to the multiplicity of present choices available to breeders, then the story is more hopeful. Perhaps the most accurate measure of diversity would be found in a comparative DNA analysis of equal random samples of old and new varieties, work that remains to be done.

The alleged grounds for hopefulness are that Drs Heald and Chapman, the authors, found 7100 varieties in 2004 catalogues, “only 2 percent fewer than one hundred years earlier. By this measure, consumers of seeds have seen almost no loss of overall varietal diversity”. Well of course that French wheat work is indeed as close as we’re likely to get to the “DNA analysis of equal random samples of old and new varieties.” And, alas, it shows what Jeremy said at the time was all too possible, and that is that genetic diversity can go down even when varietal diversity, meaning the number of cultivars of a crop, goes up. Grim after all.

Trawling seed catalogues is good fun, and can give you some clues as to what genetic erosion may be happening, but in the end it is diversity at the genetic level that really counts, let’s remember that. The geneticist JBS Haldane famously said that he would lay down his life for two of his brothers or eight of his cousins. That’s just a striking way of saying that you’re more closely related to your brother than to your cousin. The corollary of that is that there’s more genetic diversity in a group of cousins than in a group featuring the same, or indeed even a greater, number of brothers.

We still don’t know if those 7100 varieties in the 2004 catalogues are more brothers or cousins, but, if French wheat is anything to go by, the former is more likely. You may think you have a “multiplicity of present choices”, but if in fact you only have brothers to choose from, you could be forgiven for the temptation to trade a whole bunch of them for a cousin or two.

Assuming you can get hold of them, that is.

• ProMusa goes all social.
• Belgian flora goes online.
• Plant breeding goes to the people.
• FAO and ICARDA go together.
• Brits go all in on wheat pre-breeding.
• Modern dog breeds don’t go all the way back to the grey wolf.

We have blogged before about the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetic Resources Center at UC Davis and their tomato germplasm database. Now, via Dr Roger Chetelat, the director, we hear of a major addition to the data they make available.

The collecting notes of Dr Charles Rick, the world’s foremost authority on tomato genetics, who passed away in 2002 and after whom the center is named, are now online. You can see an example here, for LA1253, a Lycopersicon hirsutum f. glabratum (or Solanum habrochaites if you prefer) collected in Ecuador in 1970. The notes have been painstakingly transcribed from Dr Rick’s handwritten field notebooks, an example of which you can see below. Cannot have been easy work. And I mean both chasing after all those tomato wild relatives in the first place, and transcribing Dr Rick’s notes after so many years and with him gone.

There are plans to eventually also “scan the pages that contain drawings of fruit shape, maps of collection sites, or other tidbits that can’t readily translated into text.” As an old collector, I find this stuff fascinating. Although I’m really not sure I’d like my own field observations so mercilessly exposed to the world.

• “It seems that bananas, like Jews, are extremely perishable.” This I have to read.
• How the chicken conquered the world. This too.

• It’s so exciting: Rio+20 is almost upon us. Here’s the CGIAR’s Call to Action. Maybe they could fix the splits too?
• CIAT hopes to have some useful answers on food security and ecosystem services, in four years.
• At Chelsea, maybe the sun will shine on seedsmen of old?
• How they make flour from diverse agricultural products in Ethiopia video.
• They’re commercializing camels there too.
• Obituaries for bioinformatics tools. Stop sniggering in the back.
• Third annual Malthus lecture starts in just a few hours. In Washington DC.

Once again, May 22 rolls around as an opportunity “to increase understanding and awareness of biodiversity issues,” as the Convention on Biological Diversity puts it. This year the focus is on marine biodiversity. So we’re going to look at rainforests. And agriculture.

The Copenhagen Consensus is an interesting attempt to have a bunch of economists (usually) work out where to find the best return on investments in development. The deal is that people write a paper examining interventions designed to tackle a development problem (nutrition, AIDS, clean water …) and a bunch of other experts decide which interventions make most economic sense, given a limited pot of money. The big list of “16 investments worthy of investment” came out a week ago, with better nutrition at No. 1. At No. 6 is “creating an increase in agricultural productivity through research and development,” one of three policy options offered in response to the challenge to reduce the loss of biodiversity.

Here is Copenhagen Consensus Capo Bjorn Lomborg’s summary of the value of that:

The authors estimate that with a $14.5 billion annual infusion into research we can achieve 20 percent higher annual growth rates for crops and 40 percent higher growth rates for livestock, which over the next 40 years will significantly reduce pressures on nature and hence help biodiversity.

The other favoured option to reduce biodiversity loss is to “prevent all dense forests from being converted to agriculture”. Preventing deforestation has a benefit:cost ratio of between 3 and 30, while the benefit:cost ratio for increased agricultural R&D is between 3 and 20. (A third option — “increasing the amount of protected areas globally to around 20 percent” — is barely worth trying because it seldom reaches break-even, with benefit:cost ratios of between 0.2 and 1.4)

There’s a lot one could (but won’t) say about the Conpenhagen Consensus approach and assumptions; it is odd that investing in agriculture is part of the solution to biodiversity loss, although it is not a big part of solutions to undernutrition. And the value of agricultural biodiversity specifically is nowhere to be seen.

Which will do as our contribution to increasing understanding and awareness of biodiversity issues.

• Remnant genetic diversity detected in an ancient crop: Triticum dicoccon Schrank landraces from Asturias, Spain. Strong geographic differentiation even at small scales.
• Grass pea (Lathyrus sativus): Is there a case for further crop improvement? Yes, but then they would say that, wouldn’t they.
• Highly polymorphic nSSR markers: A useful tool to assess origin of North African cultivars and to provide additional proofs of secondary grapevine domestication events. North African cultivars do not derive from North African wild strains. Did anyone really think they did? Well, I guess it’s good to have the data.
• Building the niche through time: using 13,000 years of data to predict the effects of climate change on three tree species in Europe. You have to take into account past distributions when predicting future ones.

• “I think you’re going to need different sheep.” In Wales, that is. (And different grasslands?)
• And new cattle in India, apparently.
• Another bunch of international agricultural research centres get together. Yeah, because the other lot are doing so well.
• I wonder if any of either lot will be going to this FAO symposium on NUS in Asia in a couple of weeks’ time. And no, I don’t know why we didn’t know about this earlier.
• On the whole, though, I think I’d rather be at the Purdue llama workshop.
• Or, at a pinch, this thing on the edible Alliaceae.
• Wait, there’s also a New Alliance to Increase Food Security and Nutrition. Not sure who’s invited to this party, but the “Rome-based agencies” seem to be the ones throwing it. (I guess this comes on the heels of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ annual symposium? Where’s a good summary of what happened there? Anyone? Ah, yes, Ian Scoones explains all.)
• One of those agencies wants to hear from you if you have experience of community “gene/seed banks.”
• Unclear if Seed Savers Exchange would qualify, but they have a bunch of peas out for the “community” to have a look at.
• These Indian award-winners would definitely qualify. Which is just as well as it seems the national genebank is up for sale.
• Meanwhile, botanic gardens get together to restore degraded ecosystems.
• The Bard’s plants. Well, some of them.

The story thus far: Our plucky heroes have traced Triticum monococcum C68-101, the wild parent of a tetraploid wheat (Line 149) with interesting salinity tolerance genes, to the University of Sydney. Maybe. Kinda. Sort of. But they keep digging, and their perseverance is not long in being rewarded. We hear again from Ray Hare.

You may remember that you asked me back in March to track down the source details of the T. monococcum used as the donor of the sodium exclusion genes Nax1 and 2. At last after some detective work I have a fairly good set of identifiers that match up.

The original seed, that was obtained by the University of Sydney, came as part of a collection of monococcums from Dr Ralph Riley of the Plant Breeding Institute, Cambridge. Prof. Eldrid Baker assembled this collection of Triticum species back in the 1960′s. C68-101 is an accession identifier in the University of Sydney Wheat register with the accession number NS 3637. It is also known as “Triticum aegilopoides – 3″. All of the entries in the University species collection have now been lodged with the Australian Winter Cereals Collection where this monococcum accession has the AUS number 98382.

I have not been able to trace the original collection location. It is likely to be Israel or a neighbouring country. PBI Cambridge had links with the Hebrew University. I have seen no shortage of all manner of Triticum species in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.

I would be fairly confident that other monococcums have these Nax genes. We checked out two others from this set and each one showed Na exclusion activity. We simply had to select one accession to conduct our studies.

As I said before, the A genome diploids remain rather under researched. Who knows what may come from this ploidy level. It is quite possible that few diploids were involved in the original formation of the progenitor tetraploids and some of this A genome variation has been lost in the formation of the hexaploids. The total variation in the A genome in hexaploids is likely to be small when referenced back to that in the monococcums. I have seen good isozyme variation evidence that clearly supports this belief, in the order of a few orders of magnitude.

I am happy to be of additional assistance.