A UK-Chinese collaboration has sequenced the DNA of all the 827 kinds of wheat, assembled by Watkins, that have been nurtured at the John Innes Centre near Norwich for most of the past century.
In doing so, scientists have created a genetic goldmine by pinpointing previously unknown genes that are now being used to create hardy varieties with improved yields that could help feed Earth’s swelling population.
Strains are now being developed that include wheat which is able to grow in salty soil, while researchers at Punjab Agricultural University are working to improve disease resistance from seeds that they received from the John Innes Centre. Other strains include those that would reduce the need for nitrogen fertilisers, the manufacture of which is a major source of carbon emissions.
“Essentially we have uncovered a goldmine,” said Simon Griffiths, a geneticist at the John Innes Centre and one of the project’s leaders.
“This is going to make an enormous difference to our ability to feed the world as it gets hotter and agriculture comes under increasing climatic strain.”
If some obsessive, one individual, hadn’t collected these seeds, then an institution had kept them safe, we’d be a lot more likely to starve in the future.
The most bio-diverse land ecosystem are rainforests, and we’re cutting them down, destroying entire ecosystems. Destroying ecosystems is like burning your house to save on heating bills. Leaving aside all the climate change issues, and that collapsing ecosystems may lead to collapse of life support for humans, each animal, plant, microbe or insect we make extinct has the potential to have genes which could lead to scientific advances: not just in food crops but in medicine and if we don’t have civilization collapse, for gene therapies and enhancements of incalculable value to humanity.
Increased longevity, faster healing, improved immune systems, greater heat or cold tolerance and far, far more could be lost because of this short sightedness.
It took hundreds of millions of years to create such a diverse web of life, and on the human scale, once it’s gone, it’s gone and we aren’t getting it back.
We should either stop (we aren’t going to) or at the least preserve samples of everything we can, in vaults designed to run for at least centuries with minimal human support and without requiring more than simple maintenance. If we’re young enough, the lives we save might be our own, if not our grandchildren and later descendants will thank us, and, just perhaps, we might may be able to bring back to life some of the species we are currently genociding.
Raad
✅✅✅
Sean Paul Kelley
Agree completely, but with one rather large nit-pick. It took roughly, by modern estimates of the emergence of the first forms of life on Earth, slightly less than one billion years to create the vast web of interconnected life on Earth. The true explosion came five-hundred million years ago during the Cambrian geological era, which happened after two billion year plus Archaen age. I’m a bit of a geology geek. Sorry.
Ian Welsh
Fair enough. Correction made. 🙂
Adam Eran
In a related development, one might imagine shipping a bunch of subsidized Iowa corn to Mexico might at least impair their corn farmers’ incomes. NAFTA actually bails out the big farmers, but the little farmers growing those obscure varieties of corn that keep the disease resistance and diversity of the corn genome alive were bankrupted, and many immigrated to the US, causing “immigration panic” ginned up by the divide-and-rule crowd. But hey, that’s what you get for not adding to Monsanto’s profits!
According to Ravi Batra (SMU economist) Mexican real median income declined 34% in the wake of NAFTA–a figure not seen in the US since the Great Depression.
In better news, AMLO just prohibited GMO crops in Mexico.
Incidentally, you’ll hear there’s nothing wrong with GMO crops nutritionally. That may be true, but BT corn incorporates the natural pesticide in bacillus thuringeinsis in the plant itself. The bacterium washes off before the end of the corn season, preventing insects from successfully breeding to become immune. If it’s in the corn itself, though, the effectiveness of the insecticide will decline. But who cares whether Monsanto owes organic farmers for depriving them of an effective insecticide! More short-term profits for Monsanto!
Paul Harris
Saving species without it’s corresponding habitat is pointless
Ian Welsh
If we get to the point where we’re the sort of civilization which wants to bring back species, we’ll probably also be the sort of species which wants to bring back habitat.
Options open is a good idea.
StewartM
This has been done, as Ian says, by an economic ideology incapable of seeing that there is a difference between “money” and “wealth”, and one which actively destroys wealth to create (paper) “money”. One that also cannot see that one cannot couple “rationality” with “self-interest”, as then any consequences past one’s own lifetime will not be taken into consideration, and thus very irrational behaviors will be promoted.
Willy
I’m old enough to remember dad having to hose off the car grill protector from all the bugs after every road trip. I’m young enough to remember all the people who were comforted by Elon Musk telling us that colonizing Mars was a great option, while recognizing it as bullshit.
I think of genetic engineering to restore, but then I remember how freaked out I was the first time I saw Blade Runner. We can’t have every yahoo out there playing with genetic engineering kits. OTOH, would somebody with the wealth of Elon Musk (a more normal somebody if that’s possible), be able to document the genome of everything, just in case?
Yeah, the habitat thing would be a bitch, but life is pretty adaptable. I think I’m being successful at replacing my dying marine climate habitat with cultivated Mediterranean plants. Worst case, I remember the premise of Interstellar, where something caused the blight to decimate the few remaining species. Human screwups like climate change was alluded to, but not specifically mentioned if I remember.
Carborundum
The thing I find most interesting about this story is how the Chinese did the heavy lifting on the sequencing work – in three months – while the UK partners were stymied due to lack of funding. That speaks much more about Chinese relative research throw weight than citation indices.
different clue
If one cannot preserve whole habitats, it is better to preserve some species than to preserve nothing at all.
But it is best to preserve and maintain whole habitats, because each habitat has its own whole eco-load of species all locked together into their whole cats-cradle spiderweb of viable co-supporting relationships.
So the problem of how to protect self-maintaining habitats is a problem well worth solving above and beyond the micro-solutions of national parks and refuges and such.
I have read that something like 25% of the land based species still alive are living on the 5% or so of earth’s surface still inhabited and managed by the “original Indigenous Nations peoples” living in those habitats. So part of broadscale habitat preservation might well involve forbearing from separating the remaining Indigenous Peoples and their Indigenous Lands from eachother and recognizing and respecting the Indigenous Peoples’ clearly-proven ability to maintain high levels of species diversity in the lands under their control.
edwin
This article made me think of my wife and my own experiments with growing food.
Over time my understanding of plants has shifted. I am a gardener who saves seeds. I live in a micro climate – the northern part of the Niagara Escarpment. Think two+ hours north of Toronto on Georgian bay. Our weather is weird at the best of times, and is getting worse with global warming. Last winter had three months of early spring instead of winter – swinging between -10C and +10. Almost 10 years ago we had temperatures approaching -40 during the winter. Both have caused problems to things like insects and trees.
Our thoughts on varieties are static. It is not – especially in the plant world. It is not enough to save seeds from forgotten varieties of wheat. Wheat is dynamic and living. It must evolve and change. It must adapt to current climates and regions if it is to survive. Saving varieties in a static environment is great. Saving genetic material in a living and changing plant community is much better still. Our seed banks need to be re-introduced into the land, not as isolated genetic components that produce the most money for corporations. The genetic diversity that has existed in the past is crucial to this. The actual varieties are less so, except as reservoirs of genetic material. Seeing interactions and how they work together is critical. We need new changing plants to select from to produce things that are useful to us. We need the genetic reservoir to allow those changes to happen. It is not to protect the past from change, but to do almost the opposite, to use the diversity of the past to create a diversity of the present.
We need to think of things like land races as living genetic reservoirs. This type of agriculture is not easily subject to mechanization and large scale agriculture. We need to control and stop things like cytoplasmic male sterility being introduced into more and more commercial seeds. My hunch that this alone may eventually be more important than the seed bank filled with genetic material from past varieties of wheat. Modern agriculture seeks to destroy the past and freeze the present. Self reliance is not good business. It is possible to select for things that are immensely harmful to maximize profit and limit the competition. Seed banks as a means of corporate profit would be one of my fears. There is no way that a corporation is going to spend the resources to meet the needs of a micro climate to feed itself. If we want to grow our own food the sweat of labour is not the only thing required. They will work hard to prevent me from doing so as well.
It is not just the genetic material that is super important. It is the innovation and experimentation of farmers and gardeners. Jane Jacobs postulates that farming was once a city activity. Trade of grains resulted in spills of seeds and subsequent mixing and production of varieties that were interesting. Traders were familiar with grains and what looked interesting. Some of those verities growing at the sides of roads from accidental spills would indeed look interesting and would be selected for potential.
I don’t think that it is about bringing back plant verities from the past, rather it is about bring back lost genetic material and the genetic flow of information and the re-creation of possibilities. It is exciting to have such a genetic bank of information available. What would be even better would be to get it into the field and allow it to cross and grow and change in a number of different environments, but that is only one part of the puzzle. The creation of of a society that allows a similar experimentation to occur on an individual level, and prevents corporations from preventing this, is another part of the puzzle, and hence why I read and subscribe to this blog.
capelin
@edwin
“Saving varieties in a static environment is great. Saving genetic material in a living and changing plant community is much better still. Our seed banks need to be re-introduced into the land, not as isolated genetic components that produce the most money for corporations.”
Nice. I had a little head-rush when i read “Our seed banks need to be re-introduced into the land”. And re-saved, like versions to go back to if there’s issues.
Like GMO contamination.
Maybe humans should think about a public repository of genetic information pretty quick as well…
And yes; The Land (complete ecosystems) rule, in ways we don’t even realize.