CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

Wallingford’s Part in the Revolution

If you walk just for a few minutes up the river from CABI’s headquarters near Wallingford, UK, you come across Jethro Tull Gardens. For people of a certain age this causes some confusion – why should the council have seen fit to commemorate Ian Anderson’s prog rock band with a street name? A little further down the street is a clue – the 17^th-century house where the real Jethro Tull lived. It turns out that the band took the name from one of agriculture’s pioneers.

 

  
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull - sometime salmon farmer

but limited contribution to agricultural mechanisation

 

Jethro Tull (1674-1741) was very interested in the application of scientific method to agriculture. He noticed that hand-sown wheat seeds tended to be delivered in clumps rather than spaced at a more ideal even interval. His solution was a horse-drawn machine with a rotating cylinder with grooves cut in that meant an even flow of seeds were added as the machine was moved along. The seeds landed in three channels dug by a plough at the front of the machine, and then were covered up by a harrow at the back of the machine. This meant greatly reduced wastage of seeds.

 

 
Jethro Tull - church-organ vandal but major agricultural visionary

 

Tull’s prototype seed drill was built from the foot pedals of a local church organ. Tull’s was not the first seed drill, in that double-tube seed drills were in existence in China 2000 years earlier, and Italian inventors had patented simpler versions of the concept, but his took the idea to a new level of practicability. It was unpopular with farm workers who feared they would lose their jobs, and it appears that it was sabotaged. He later developed a horse-drawn hoe to remove weeds, which is described along with other ideas in “Horse-Hoeing Husbandry: An Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Nutrition”. Tull is now seen as a major figure in the British Agricultural Revolution, but his ideas took a long time to gain acceptance.  Mechanised seed drills were not widely used until the 19^th century.

 

CABI moved to Wallingford in the 1980s with the aim of centralizing its expertise in the appliance of science to agriculture. So it was a good omen that 300 years earlier, a local farmer was doing something very similar.

How synchrotrons could aid crop protection

Image courtesy of Diamond (www.diamond.ac.uk) 

2003 saw construction begin on a facility representing the UK’s largest investment in science for over 40 years. Diamond Light Source opened in 2007 and is an impressive structure on the South Oxfordshire landscape, 10 miles or so from where I’m sitting in CABI’s head office. It is a synchrotron and without synchrotrons scientists couldn’t have carried out groundbreaking research as diverse as studying the life cycle of the deadly malaria parasite in living red blood cells or following the crystallisation of pure cocoa butter to find out the optimum conditions for chocolate manufacture¹. Last week saw the 100^th structure to be identified by Diamond².

Is it a bug’s life?

Avid followers of …handpicked and carefully sorted…. will recall my previous blog on bees and the debate on whether neonicotinoid insecticides should be banned or not. Well, unsurprisingly, the debate continues. A media release from the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) on 11 September called for an “independent and comprehensive assessment of the impact of neonicotinoids”. This is in response to a call from Buglife for the suspension on the use of these chemicals.

Make sure broccoli is a definite in your five-a-day intake

Studies have shown a substance in broccoli has cancer-preventing ability – read on to find out how much broccoli you should be eating…

The International Day for Biological Diversity

The 22nd May 2009 is 'The International Day for Biological Diversity'. For 2009 the theme is Invasive Alien Species (IAS) - a major threat to biodiversity and food production - and a research and knowledge provision area that we here at CABI are are highly skilled in. The majority of our scientists time is spent tackling various IAS and mitigating their impact on agriculture and the wider environment. In addition our publishing team put together a detailed range of products, including the CAB Abstracts database subset on invasives, Major texts on Invasives (print and e-book) and also we are developing with the assistance of a consortia of international donors the Invasive Species Compendium for launch in 2010.

Ask our invasive expert a question today

Arne Witt is the coordinator for Invasive Species at CABI Africa based in Nairobi, Kenya. Arne is responsible for coordinating all CABI activities associated with Invasive Alien Species (IAS) on the African continent. He is also the current International Project Coordinator for the UNEP-GEF project, “Removing Barriers to Invasive Plant Management in Africa”.

You can ask Arne a question about invasive species on the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Ask an expert site during the whole of today, May 19th 2009. I encourage you to check the site on a regular basis throughout the day and pose questions to Arne.

Express Yourself Genetically: Say It With Flowers

 

Is it a plant or is it animal? Is it an artwork or is it a science project? Is it a profound statement or just messing about? These are just some of the questions unlikely to be answered by Edunia, a transgenic flower with artist Eduardo Kac's own DNA expressed in the red veins.  It is part of an exhibition "Natural History of the Enigma" at the  Weisman Art Museum, in Minneapolis.

The Edunia has red veins on light pink petals and a gene of the artist is expressed on every cell of its red veins, i.e., Kac's gene produces a protein in the veins only. The gene was isolated and sequenced from Kac's blood. Kac sees the petal pink background, against which the red veins are seen, as evocative of his own pinkish white skin tone. The result of this molecular manipulation is a bloom that creates the living image of human blood rushing through the veins of a flower. The gene Kac selected is responsible for the identification of foreign bodies. In this work, it is precisely that which identifies and rejects the other that the artist integrates into the other, thus creating a new kind of self that is partially flower and partially human. Molecular biologist Neil Olszewski at the University of Minnesota collaborated with Kac on the project.

In 2002 Kac exhibited ‘Alba’, a transgenic albino rabbit: She contains a jellyfish gene that makes her glow green when illuminated with the correct light. Alba was created by French scientists who injected green fluorescent protein (GFP) of a Pacific Northwest jellyfish into the fertilized egg of an albino rabbit. This was not the first transgenic GFP animal, but probably the first to grace an art gallery.

Kac says "Natural History of the Enigma" is a reflection on the "contiguity of life between different species. It uses the redness of blood and the redness of the plant's veins as a marker of our shared heritage in the wider spectrum of life."

In anticipation of a future in which Edunias can be distributed socially and planted everywhere, Kac created a set of "Edunia Seed Packs", which are included in the exhibition. The "Edunia Seed Packs" contain actual Edunia seeds and are part of the permanent collection of the Weisman Art Museum.

George Gessert, another genetic artist, points out that this is the continuation of a trend, with Edward Steichen exhibiting hybrid delphiniums at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. More recently, Suzanne Ankers made sculptures of chromosomes and Dave Powell has bred  "artcats" specifically for exhibition in galleries.

Those negatively disposed to transgenic organisms are likely to see this as further evidence of scientists fiddling about with things that they shouldn't for no good reason. Others may see it as artists just finding another medium to work with - the DNA of living organisms. So expect to find pipettes and Petri dishes alongside the paintbrushes in your local art shop.

Find out more: http://www.ekac.org/nat.hist.enig.html

CABI caught on camera - natural pesticides and Himalayan balsam

CABI has produced two YouTube videos highlighting the work of our scientists:

Following in Darwin’s footsteps: unearthing Chile’s hidden world
Two crop protection scientists from CABI embark upon a journey to extreme environments in Chile. They are on a mission to find fungi and nematodes that could be used to make natural pesticides.

In search of biological control agents for Himalayan balsam
CABI scientists travel to India searching for biological control agents to combat Britain’s devastatingly invasive weed Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera). The plant is native to the Himalayan range making this the perfect place to study the natural interactions between the plant and its environment.

Find out more about CABI's projects.

Environmental impacts of Bt crops – on target or non-target?

Genetically modified crops containing a toxin gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis have been used by farmers for 11 years now. These Bt crops were designed to give the plants resistance to important pests. But might they also be harming non-target invertebrates?  A study by Steven Naranjo of the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service looks at the evidence and compares it with the impacts of the pesticides that would otherwise have been used.

Bt maize and cotton have been commercially produced on about 42 million hectares in 20 countries. Their potential non-target effects have been considered in over 360 published research papers. Naranjo, in his paper in CAB Reviews, looks across around 200 of these studies to draw conclusions.

 

Investigations found that the abundance of all non-target invertebrates was slightly lower for Bt crops than in non-Bt crops, but much higher in Bt crops than in non-Bt crops treated with insecticides. Using meta-analysis, a way of doing a meaningful comparison across different studies, Naranjo found that laboratory studies indicated negative effects of Bt on some non-target invertebrates, though these depended on how the trials were done and which invertebrates were being looked at. However, few harmful effects of Bt crops were shown in field studies. One factor may be that exposure to the Bt toxin is higher in the laboratory experiments than in the field. It was also clear that nontarget effects for insecticides are much greater than for Bt crops.

 

While Bt crops mean that some specialist parasitoids that would otherwise attack pests of maize have less to feed on, the overall levels of predation on pests have not been shown to drop. Naranjo believes Bt crops could enhance the role of biological control in integrated pest management.

 

Naranjo's paper emphasises that a key comparison to make is what would have happened without Bt crops. Bt maize and Bt cotton are believed to have led to a 136.6 million kg reduction in insecticide active ingredient, and rootworm-resistance crops will reduce the levels of insecticide present in the soil.

 

The paper, "Impacts of Bt crops on non-target invertebrates and insecticide use patterns" by Steven E. Naranjo appears in CAB Reviews: Perspectives in Agriculture, Veterinary Science, Nutrition and Natural Resources, 2009, 4, No. 011, 23 pp.

Download full CAB Reviews article

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Sri Lankan coconut farmers predict yields for future climates

Millions of people in the tropics depend on coconuts for food, raw materials and livelihood. Coconuts are also a high value commercial crop. But like any crop, coconuts are at risk of drought and other prolonged events. By using climate science and better agricultural forecast models, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) has helped increase the resilience of coconut plantations to climate variability in one of the world's major producers, Sri Lanka.

"Coconut cultivation sustains the livelihood of large numbers in the tropics and is the most important crop for food security after rice in Sri Lanka," says IRI scientist Lareef Zubair.