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Uprooting crop diversity

Moving house is never any fun, but it’s particularly tricky for collections of crop diversity. You have to get the new facilities all ready, and all those seeds or test tubes or indeed live plants need to be kept safe and sound during the process, and then re-established in their new digs, and possibly new people may need to be hired and trained. Safe to say, you probably want to avoid relocating genebanks unless absolutely necessary, which is why it’s not all that common.

Surprising then to come across two examples within a few days.

The Domaine de Vassal grapevine collection in France 1 is being moved to save it from the encroaching waters of the Mediterranean. Or maybe it a problem with the lease? Anyway, it’s been in the works for at least 10 years, but it does seem to be finally happening. Despite, ahem, some reservations.

The rub with the new proposed site is that only a portion of its soil is sand-based. The collection is destined for a hillside of limestone-clay soils where the vines would be grafted onto rootstock.

“A heresy!” Deiss protested, saying grafting compromises the authenticity of the vines.

In contrast, USDA’s National Soybean Germplasm Collection on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus 2 was supposed to be relocated in fiscal 2026, that was stopped by various stakeholders, but the whole thing is back on the agenda for fiscal 2027. The issue seems to be where the collection can be conserved more cost-effectively, but there may also be a bit of local politics involved as well. Predictably, I suppose.

“Having that vast collection so accessible to U. of I. researchers directly benefits Illinois farmers,” said Abigail Peterson, director of agronomy for the Illinois Soybean Association. “Whether it’s a new disease or soy oleic, I think the germplasm collection is the only avenue to explore and develop new traits. It’s just a huge tool in our toolbox.”

Good luck to the people involved in both cases. Whatever happens, I’m sure we all hope the collections remain safe and available for the long term.

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Beat the heat with seeds

I haven’t yet had a chance to read the full FAO–WMO joint report on Extreme heat and agriculture, but some preliminary skimming reveals that agrobiodiversity does seem to be addressed, at least to some extent:

No mention of genebanks, mind you. I guess you can’t have everything, but you’d have thought the following snippets could easily have been used to make the case very explicitly for ex situ conservation of crop diversity.

For domesticated agricultural species, human influence on the genome through selective breeding for enhanced performance in increasingly homogenous production environments has resulted in a loss of natural genetic variability that have accentuated many species vulnerability to temperature extremes.

…

It is only through innovation and the implementation of adaptative measures (e.g.
selective breeding, making changes in the physical environment and altering management practices) that the global community can shelter agricultural activities from the larger forces of planetary human induced climate change.

…

Switching to more resilient species to extreme heat may result in reduced genetic diversity, increasing the vulnerability of crops and livestock to large-scale losses due to a narrower genetic base.

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A mycelial thread through human history

A very interesting, wide-ranging review in New Scientist makes the point that fungi were not for ancient humans the marginal resources that their near invisibility in the traditional archaeological record might suggest. In fact, they contributed to diets, health and social organisation, and even fire-making. Here’s a quick summary of what new analytical techniques in archaeology, sometimes linked with ethnography, are revealing, according to the article.

Fire technology (Mesolithic to Neolithic): Polypore fungi, especially Fomes fomentarius, were deliberately harvested, cut, scorched and processed into amadou. This is a felt-like, highly flammable material that people used as portable tinder, forming compact fire-starting kits together with birch bark and pyrite.

Food (Palaeolithic, including Neanderthals): Evidence from dental plaque DNA shows consumption of multiple species (e.g. gray shag, split gill, porcini), suggesting diets were more diverse than has been assumed. Mushrooms may partially explain isotopic signals previously attributed to meat consumption.

Medicine: A Neanderthal individual consumed grasses containing penicillin-producing mould, possibly to treat a dental abscess. Later, Ötzi the Iceman (~3300 BCE) carried amadou, but also birch polypore mushrooms. These may have had medicinal purposes (anti-parasitic, antimicrobial), though they were not found in the stomach, so a new hypothesis suggests they may have been used as fishing floats, based on morphology and experimental replication.

Subsistence and resource extraction: Polypores and puffballs may have been burned to produce smoke to anaesthetise bees, making harvesting honey a lot easier.

Fermentation (Neolithic): Moulds such as Monascus enabled enzymatic conversion of rice starch to sugars, facilitating alcohol production by the so-called “red qu” method. Pottery residues in East Asia show evidence of such brewing some 10,000 years ago, much earlier than originally thought. Fermented beverages were likely used in ritual, mortuary, and communal contexts and may have contributed to social cohesion, identity formation and early political and religious structures.

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The seeds of tropical fodder grass development

Usually, if plant breeders do anything at all with wild species, they use them to try to improve the domesticated relative in some way. But in Bajra–Napier Hybrids (BNH), it’s actually the crop that is used to improve a wild (or at least wildish) relative.

That’s more than just a fun fact. BNH are actually pretty important forages in tropical and subtropical livestock systems, though you don’t hear too much about them other than from specialists. I certainly hadn’t, until a recent social media blitz from ICRISAT.

They are made by crossing the crop pearl millet (bajra, Pennisetum glaucum) with the related forage Napier grass (Pennisetum purpureum). This has the effect of combining nicely complementary traits into a highly productive fodder plant.

The best thing about BNH is their high yield of biomass. Under ideal conditions, annual green fodder production can exceed 200–300 tonnes per hectare, which comfortably outperforms other forage grass options. This productivity is due to fast growth, profuse tillering, and efficient nutrient uptake. For smallholder dairy systems, where land is usually at a premium, such a yield advantage translates pretty quickly into higher milk output per area. Also, BNH are perennial, which reduces costs over time, as fields can remain productive for several years with proper care.

And the nutritional profile of the fodder is pretty good. Crude protein is typically 8–14%, depending on management and cutting stage, while digestibility remains ok if the plants are harvested relatively early, before they start getting woody, say at 45–60 day intervals.

BNH are resilient, being tolerant to drought and intermittent water stress, a trait inherited largely from pearl millet, though they also respond well to irrigation and fertilization. That makes them widely suitable, everywhere from low-input rainfed systems to intensive peri-urban dairying.

All that said, there are drawbacks. Perhaps the main one is that BNH are typically sterile, not producing seeds, and therefore have to be propagated vegetatively, through stem cuttings or root splits. This means farmers depend on planting material supply chains that are often weak or informal. Diseases can also be transmitted more easily via vegetative material. Plus high biomass production demands big nutrient inputs, particularly nitrogen, with inadequate fertilization quickly eroding both yield and quality. That can be expensive.

In response, an important recent line of research has focused on developing seed-propagated BNH. Seeds simplify dissemination, reduce transport costs, and mitigate the spread of vegetatively transmitted diseases. They also enable more formal seed sector engagement, including developing new varieties.

Making fertile hybrids is technically tricky. Sterility in the classic hybrids is due to genomic incompatibilities between the parental species, basically their different ploidies, or numbers of chromosomes. So breeding strategies have explored chromosome doubling, intermediate ploidy levels, and backcrossing to restore partial fertility while retaining the desirable forage traits.

This has been reasonably successful, but trade-offs remain: some seed-propagated lines show lower biomass yields or less persistence compared to established clonal hybrids, and ensuring consistent performance across environments is still a work in progress. So it’s good to see ICRISAT and its partner still on the case, hard at work.

LATER: Dr Chris Jones, program leader for feed and forage development at ILRI, who should know, tells me that the currently accepted names for the parents of BNH are Cenchrus americanus (pearl millet) and C. purpureus (Napier grass). Something to do with Cenchrus being nested within Pennisetum evolutionarily speaking, so the best bet was to merge the genera, but under the name Cenchrus because that is the older one.

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Brainfood: Animal diversity edition