A second round-up of events today at the meeting about the crop diversity collections of the Pavlovsk Experiment Station, which are threatened with destruction for housing

The second day of the meeting ^[1] was a chance for the project team to provide some context for their work of the past 3 years, for an audience which on this occasion included not just VIR staff, as on the previous day, but researchers from agricultural universities and the Institute of Botany, a representative of the Ministry of Agriculture from Moscow, and the local media.

First, Professor Nikolay Dzyubenko, the director of VIR, gave an overview of the history of the institute and its achievements. Despite a tight budget, the institute perseveres in its collecting, evaluation, distribution, breeding and research work. For example, almost 4,000 accessions were added to the collection in 2010 as a result of collecting in Russia and some neighbouring countries; 15,000 accessions were evaluated; and about 20,000 distributed, mainly to breeding institutes around Russia. We were reminded that the Russian Minister of Agriculture told the world at a high-level meeting on food security at FAO in November 2009 that VIR’s collection was available for use by the world’s plant breeders in their efforts to adapt crops to climate change. Next year will be the 125th anniversary of Vavilov’s birth, and celebrations are being planned.

The celebrations, however, are bound to have a hollow ring to them if the problems that the Pavlovsk Station has been experiencing of late are not resolved.

We heard the latest news from Artem Sorokin, who also outlined the history and make-up of the collection. A moratorium is now in place, as of 9 December 2010, on any commercial development of the site. And the composition of the expert commission that will decide on the future of the station has apparently been agreed. It looks like they may visit the station in May. Still all to play for. In parallel, VIR is working with the Ministry of Agriculture on the text of a law on plant genetic resources that will seek to settle the legal standing of germplasm collections, and put their funding on a more secure footing.

Luigi Guarino of the Global Crop Diversity Trust attempted to put the work of VIR in a wider institutional context. The Trust has been very active in an international campaign to support VIR’s efforts to save Pavlovsk. The length and breadth of expertise at VIR, and the historical importance, uniqueness, size and diversity of the collections it manages, strongly suggest that it could — and should — play a regional, and indeed global, role in the long-term conservation and availability of crop diversity. The best way it can show its readiness and ability to do this is by sharing data through such platforms as Eurisco and Genesys. And by placing its collections in the Multilateral System of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. We were assured during the Q&A that VIR is working hard for Russian ratification of the Treaty.

Finally, Jessica Fanzo, Bioversity’s nutritionist, provided a frightening summary of Russian health. In 2001, the latest year for which she could find solid data, 10% of Russian children were malnourished, and 50% of adults overweight or obese. That’s a stunning double burden, driven by the unrelenting “modernization”, and concomitant simplification, of diets. Fanzo quoted the Federal Consumer Protection Service as saying that Russia is losing its culinary traditions. And with them, she added, its health. That’s why projects such as the one just ended are so important. This new research on the nutritional quality of some of the berries in the Pavlovsk collection represents a new sort of collaboration, between genebanks and nutritionists, which will hopefully help forge new connections, between local plant genetic resources and better nutrition.

There was much spirited discussion of this topic, which obviously struck a chord with the participants, who bombarded Jessica with requests for nutritional advice. One response stuck in my mind. Jessica was asked whether one couldn’t get all the vitamins and minerals one needs from pills. She said yes, but you have to get everything else from food, so why not the vitamins as well, by choosing your food better?

Much remains to be done in making that connection between local berries and better nutrition in Russia. Research will be needed on bioavailability, on the health impact of increased consumption, and on the best ways to approach promotion. But the first link in the chain is in place, in that we now have a clear idea of the great nutritional value of many of the accessions in the Pavlovsk collection. What a tragedy it would be if the collection were to be lost now, just as we begin to truly understand how valuable it could be to Russia, and indeed the world. That, at any rate, is the gist of the statement that will come out of the meeting, and the message that the journalists present will hopefully take back to their readers, and everybody back to their families.

1. Conservation, characterization and evaluation for nutrition and health of vegetatively propagated crop collections at the Vavilov Institute, a partnership between VIR, the Centre de Recherche Public–Gabriel Lippmann in Luxembourg and Bioversity International. [↩]

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This just in from Our Man on Nevsky Prospekt with the thermal underwear and the Kevlar vest.

Do 4,700 berry plants, belonging to 542 species, 165 genera and 48 families have a value that is greater than what you’d pay for the land they’re sitting on? The question may not be stated so boldly in the project document. After all, that was written long before the recent problems at Pavlovsk, but answering that question is basically the objective of a project ^[1] that is drawing to a close with a two-day meeting in St Petersburg this week.

We heard today from Pablo Eyzaguirre of Bioversity that according to the World Bank the Russian Federation foregoes $300 billion in national income due to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and the like. As Arten Sorokin, head of VIR’s fruit and berry department, pointed out, at least a partial solution to that would be for each Russian to eat twice as much fresh fruit and berries. These are a part of Russian foodways that is being overtaken by the global shift to “modern” diets, to disastrous effect. How can the genebank help to turn back the tide of Coca Cola and Big Macs?

Well, clearly, an important first step is to quantify — and publicise — the nutritional value of the different species and accessions it has been maintaining so painstakingly and laboriously for years and decades, work that is now threatened. For the berry plants in question are indeed those at VIR’s Pavlovsk Research Station. Project staff have been measuring things like the mineral nutrient and antioxidant content and sugar profiles of the berries, as well as the genetic diversity of the collections (using microsatellites). The project has focused on blackcurrant (Ribes), blue honeysuckle (Lonicera) and Raspberry (Rubus). There are respectively 870, 46 and 153 different samples of these berries at Pavlovsk, and a few more in other VIR genebanks in other parts of the country, collected from throughout the former Soviet Union and beyond. Isabelle Lefevre summarized the results of the past three years of lab work. ^[2]

It turns out that there are big differences between the genera in all the nutritional qualities measured, but in no case was there a clear correspondence between groups of genetically similar accessions of a given species and groups of biochemically similar accessions of that species. There is as much variation in nutritional quality within genetic groups as between.

There was some discussion of whether using ecogeographic groups rather than genetic groups would give a better correspondence with the biochemical profiles. But the results as they currently stand mean that two nutritionally “good” accessions are no likelier than any others to be genetically similar. So one could promote multiple varieties high in nutritional quality without worrying overmuch about narrowing the genetic base of the crop. Also, for blackcurrant at any rate, anthocyanin content was correlated with high mineral levels, so one could theoretically select the nutritionally “good” varieties on colour.

But, as Jessica Fanzo, a nutritionist at Bioversity, pointed out there are of course a number of steps before a genetic resource becomes a nutritional resource. Place of cultivation, processing, and bio-availability all have to have their say. But the project team did put together by the end of the first day the elements of a message that could be of great interest to the wider group that will assemble tomorrow for the second day of the meeting, and which will include the media. In essence, a serving of some berries provides a level of antioxidants known to have protective properties with regard to heart disease and some cancers.

NI Vavilov and workers at Pavlovsk in 1927

That relatively simple message about the value of the collection needs to be seen in wider context, however. It isn’t enough to turn around and save only the nutritionally good accessions, because there are still many question for the full collection to answer. How well do they grow? Which are more adaptable? Are adaptability and, say, nutritional value found in the same samples, or is breeding going be needed? You can surely think of others.

Nevertheless, there is a clear message. Some of the accessions investigated by the project are nutritionally much more valuable than others. Thanks to the project, we know which berries they are. Thanks to Pavlovsk, we have the berries. On that basis alone, surely they’re more valuable than the land they occupy on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Let’s hope that the project team is successful in getting that policy message across tomorrow.

1. Conservation, characterization and evaluation for nutrition and health of vegetatively propagated crop collections at the Vavilov Institute, a partnership between VIR, the Centre de Recherche Public–Gabriel Lippmann in Luxembourg and Bioversity International. [↩]
2. And look what I found: Investigation of genetic diversity in Russian collections of raspberry and blue honeysuckle. [↩]

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