Putting nutrients back into wheat
Breeding can repair a poor mutation in cultivated crops.
When ancient farmers first domesticated wheat some 10,000 years ago, they were trying to breed a crop perfectly suited to making food. But it seems that somewhere along the line, farmers unwittingly took out a gene that packs the plant full of goodness. Now researchers have found a way to fix that old mistake and put the nutrients back.
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Comments
I have not read the full article yet. I am curious what the yield of the new plant is. One explanation I can think of for the loss of the gene through evolution is the lack of all those nutrient in the environment, which in turn lowered the yield of these rich plants. And I believe our farms have been yield-driven along its development. As a result, farmers picked the high-yield but low-nutrient strain to grow. So my concern is: can our over-used environment afford this high-profile wheat?
Posted by: zhen zhang | November 24, 2006 06:47 PM
"Some 80% of US wheat varieties are public; it is a self-pollinating species, so farmers tend to develop their own strains without needing to buy proprietary versions. As a result there has been little commercial motivation to make a better wheat plant — agricultural companies have traditionally focused on other crops."
The author totally ignores (and by implication denigrates) the huge and successful public sector breeding effort on inbreeding cereals. The "Green Revolution" was a revolution in such crops and was driven by public sector workers like Norman Borlaug, who received a Nobel Prize for Peace for his role in helping developing countries feed themselves.
A major public sector breeding effort continues in wheat etc., with continuing success.
Posted by: Oliver Mayo | November 28, 2006 02:49 AM
I've read about an old method of harvesting wheat (or perhaps it was rice, but I don't think so) in which the crop was cut while still a bit green and stooked to ripen. There was some evidence that this caused more nutrients to go into the grain. Sounds like another way to get the same effect, though of course not suitable to modern farming methods.
Does wheat REALLY provide 20% of calories worldwide??? If so, that sure explains some of the difficulty of eating a gluten free diet, as I've had to do the last 7 years. I was an expert at making bread before then.
Posted by: Donna Hudson | November 30, 2006 03:23 PM
I really do not know much about the reality of ethanol from citrus, but I hope it is not as big of a disaster as ethanol from corn. The largest winners from the manufacture of ethanol from corn are the corn farmers. This year even the price of US wheat to American wheat farmers went up to $5.65 per bushel partly because of the tremendous amount of acreage that was diverted by wheat farmers to corn production so they could get in on the corn cash train. Last year I sold my wheat for $3.75, per bushel this year $2.00 higher. It was nice but still it is a rip off of the general public.
Posted by: immu-boost | August 16, 2007 04:47 PM