 I'd like to welcome you all to see the seminar of our boss, Dr. Rory Sack, the head of them. Now I'd like to call Dr. Kenneth McNally, our senior scientist, to do the proper introduction. They've been together forever I think. Thank you, Mal. It's my pleasure to introduce Rory's background to you. He's, as already described, he's the head of our genetic resources center. He obtained all of his education at the University of Cambridge in the UK, B.A. in 1975 in Natural Sciences, followed by his M.A. in Applied Biology in 1977, and his PhD in 1980, working on the genetic diversity of tripolium. After that, he served as a consultant with HIPAAE, several times postdocs at University of Wales. He was the head of the bean gene bank for genetic resources and breeding at SEAT, and then moved to the Institute for Grassland and Environmental Research in Wales, where he was from 1990 to 2002, at which time he joined us at Geary. And as research highlights, all of his career has been spent working on genetic resources, which is the topic that he will be describing to us today. So adventures in the world of rice diversity, an update on our very important gene bank. Thank you. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you to the seminar committee. I think thank you for the invitation to this meeting. I wasn't given much of a chance to say no. They reminded me that it's been many years since I've given one of these seven hours. And in the 11 years I've been here, we've been through quite a few adventures, which is quite a good business total. Some pretty exciting adventures, some adventures that we prefer not to have plenty, but I'm going to try and take you through most of them, not all of them. It's been a skip over an awful lot of things to try and cover all the ground. I hope to give you just a flavor of the kind of things we've had to deal with. Here, this, just as a reminder, December 12, 2012 was the 35th anniversary of the construction of our new intern store back in 1977. I wanted to say, I wanted to start by saying that rice is incredibly diverse. And unfortunately, that's exactly how Bob started his seminar just last week. So I've had to think of a different way of showing how diverse it is. I can't see many Africans in this room. But we now know that Africa is the center of diversity of humans. We think of the human species as being really diverse. We celebrate all the differences between us. And we think rice is inbred, and inbred means it's not very diverse. But actually, it's exactly the way around. Rice is way more diverse than people. People are so inbred, and it's formally decent. And we have to pity our four sequences. The people who were sequencing rice, they thought they would learn from the human-human experience. And they haven't been able to do what they found as the algorithms that work with humans. Just don't even work with rice because rice is so diverse. So you think what diversity there is in this room amongst us, and then multiply that many-fold, and you get to rice is working. So our story begins nearly 20 million years ago. This is what we want to look like. It was a really big disaster, environmentally. We're in the process of global warming. The pull-up ice caps were rapidly melting. A few billion years later, they disappeared completely. The constant of Australia was about to slam into Southeast Asia and mess up all these islands and create hurricanes. And out of this environmental disaster came a horizon. Just about in this room, this is the origin of the horizon. Here's a timeline starting about 14 billion years ago. This is the temperature being shown here along a scale of some sort of complicated scale. You see here, the horizon originated when there was no ice cap at all in this warm period, about 14 million years ago. Then our genus appears about two million years ago at the beginning of the Ice Ages. We appeared about 400,000 years ago, not quite sure exactly when in the period of the two-meter interglacial periods in the Ice Ages. And then rice agriculture started probably around about 10,000 years ago during this period of disability. So there's been a lot of climate change throughout the history of the horizon. And this is a very brief summary of how the genus evolved. It's starting here, the ancestor in Southeast Asia, somewhere around here. All these different genus were recognized from the Heiei up to the Gays and Elves. These are supposed to represent the bitcoins that are put in brackets so that there's a little bit of existence. The feed is here because it's present in the tetrachloid. And it's migrated from here to Asia and Africa and Australia. This first arrow is showing the genomes that migrated. And the second arrow is showing the new genomes that appeared in the continent after the development. So this BC is different from the BC because it arose as a separate event from the BC genomes that we have here and here. And in Australia a new genome appeared. Finally it went to the Americas and a new genome appeared there. But what we still have is the majority of the genomes being here. So we have the Southeast Asia being the center of genomic manned species richness. I've put up two graphs here but they're known as the show of the same thing. Counting the number of distinct genomes and the number of distinct species by region with the genomes color coded here. So you see with Southeast Asia we have eight distinct genomes represented here. Twelve distinct species that belong to only one area. With Africa, Australia and America each having their own distinctive genomes but a smaller diversity. The domestication have been much more recent. Somewhere between 10,000 and 14,000 years ago it was believed around the Lower Yangtze River here in China. I've marked here some of the more famous, called the Archaeological sites. They're more or less tourist sites now. This one 14,000 years is now known as the oldest site with evidence of association with rice. Not particularly rice farming but certainly with association with rice. And that leads us to the problem that we're always told about. Agriculture has reduced crop diversity. Partly because of this original domestication event. This mutant, these mutants require agriculture that particularly the grains don't shatter. They stay on the plant waiting to be harvested. It was very rare. So the farmers found that mutant in one population and by definition it got through a very severe bottleneck. And they would gradually spread out and the whole of rice is coming from that. But we've seen not quite that one population. And then there's been a second bottleneck more recent through agriculture where a few thousand modern varieties have started to replace the hundreds of thousands of traditional varieties. This has been a big concern in violating and for state sustainability over many years now. The FAO estimates that about 70% of crop diversity has been lost. Swaminathan Research Foundation in India, they estimate, I have no idea how they estimate it, India used to have 400,000 varieties just in that country of which about 100,000 are still in use on farm. That's a huge loss of diversity because it's real. And yet, well, sorry, and there is confirmation that this comes from the rice, SNP consortium analysis in Cornell. So if you look at the SNP diversity of the wild ancestor versus the cultivated variety, we've seen much less diversity from the cultivated rice than we have from the wild ancestor. And yet, we see in some respects that the cultivated rice is much more diverse than wild rice. Here I've shown the standard deviation of grain length for each species, so here's a sativa and each of these are different wild species. And you see that a sativa is much more variable than any of the other wild species, which doesn't really match this idea that we've lost diversity. And look at this, cultivated rice distribution versus distribution of all wild rice species together. I've tried to go in here, the northern and southern lipids of all the wild rice species of the horizon. And the northern and southern lipids very approximately of rice cultivation. One species that occupies environments that no wild rice has ever been able to spread into. And I think this is an important thing to keep in your mind. Start thinking transgressive segregation. What farmers have done here is taken rice into new environments, generated new types of rice that will be able to survive in environments that wild rice can't. And I'm going to be coming back to that several times. It's almost ubiquitous. If you want to look at something that you've made, I can more guarantee you'll find it. You'll find it at least something different. Here it is an example of a variety from Nepal. You look at the whole grains. They look pretty much normal, but you break the grains open and you find two rice grains inside one's millet. We had a question about this a few years ago and I wrote back saying we've never heard of such a rice. But then I thought it was one that I'd been having a look and found this one which we do have in the village. But of course a lot of the interesting things we find come from not from our own research, but the people that use it. And the ones I like most are where they disprove previous beliefs that there was a widespread opinion that modern varieties of farmers flower only in the middle of the day and this is a problem for breeding for climate change. But Greg Howell came along, Greg Howell, we've worked with a seed group, came along and said let's see if that's actually true, they took 4,000 diverse rice accession plants from New Bank, stayed in the field from six o'clock in the morning until midday to watch when they flower and they found those that do flower, they'll plant flowers early in the morning. Some of them confirmed a lot of dependence on variation in the temperature during the day, but it confirms the general principle that we can find variation for a kind of varied flowering. Another one, the publication was produced claiming that every aromatic rice in the world shares the same allele. So of course people came along from the communication of great quality and they were trying to telling us we no longer need to screen our varieties for aroma because we just need to apply the genetic test. We know they all have the same allele, so we can do the genetic test much more than I do deeply. And a lot of the ones that we knew to be aromatic didn't have this gene. So this is the result of that. They found nine different alleles all making these varieties fragrant from different parts of the world that are not the normal fragrance allele. But maybe there's even more than one gene. Here's the concentration of 2AP, which is the main aromatic compound, a frequency distribution of the accession of the aromatic, one group in for the basmatic kind and another group in for the other group. So you see basmatic occupying this range of 2AP concentrations. Jasmine, the other famous one, is round back here also in the middle here. When you look up here, these are two varieties from Iran, more than twice as aromatic as basmatic or jasmine. That kind of makes you think maybe there's a second gene blockers involved, although I don't think that has been properly tested yet. It's still just a speculation to make this. Well, in Canada, suppose there must be limits to variation. So I've tried to do this as defining universal grain size, top grain length, the grain width, and these fluid, which is a rather crude approximation to the shape of the grain at each point. But every accession we have in the gene map lies somewhere within this range. But then I think, oh, it does it. I bet if somebody wanted to create a variety that was more extreme than this, this ellipse that we do so quite easily has been done by Simit for wheat, and they've created really huge, great, huge particles all the way outside the normal range of the particles. And this, well, I have to put this in every seminar about the genetic resources. I said, look, this pleading, it's about not publishing variety names as a variety name. This variety, and this variety, are both called kalkam from Laos. This one with dark leaves is a normal grain, and this one with normal leaves is a dark grain. You would have called it the same variety, but they are the same variety. And these two also, these are also kalkam. Kalkam with a normal looking grain and a black husk. Kalkam with a black grain and a normal looking husk. These are four entirely different varieties with the same name. So please all of you, when you publish papers, don't just say pokali or azuacema, or... Give the source that we know which particular one you're talking about. Which only is an interesting question if micro-cultures reduce so much diversity, why do we get so much? And the first two here names I think are quite important in giving us hints when Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, one of the big factors leading him to the theory of the origin of species was noticing how much variation there was in domesticated species. Species were associated with humans. And that law also noticed that near the centers of origin of croplums, that's where we find those mostly commercial croplums. And I think that the key answer came from Stephen Gold, who is quite popular writers, I guess a lot of you may have heard of these names. And particularly his concept of punctuated evolution. The idea is that for millions of years at a time, evolution may have made more or less being non-existent, there may be no change. And very slowly there is a change. But then every now and again you get a period of rapid evolution associated with changing conditions. And when you think about it, that's what's happened with farmers. Basically they've changed the rules of evolution. It's no longer described as a pitest in the evolutionist sense of natural selection. It's now whatever we choose to survive is what survives. There's a completely different criteria for what persists. They change the environment. So change the natural selection pressures. They reduce cultivation and breeding and improving the soils, reducing competition. They provide us peace, so they evolved faster. So the crop needed to evolve faster. They shared with their seed around exposing them to different climates, different soils, different people's tastes. So it again not blinded the way the ways that the different directions of selection. And after building them there was introduced forms that hybridized for the local cause. So the result was the massive generation of new diversity was relevant to hybrid culture. And that's what's negative in adaptation to the environment. It's freeing up from the natural selection and recombining new genotypes of what's allowed them to take the range of the time but furthermore from the south to the west. And I'd just like to draw the analogy with what we still do now. We share advice. Then we make process, we choose the best progeny, we combine that with better agronomy and there's your improved agriculture. So what we're doing now is in a sense just a continuation of what's been going on for 10,000 years. So yes, there has been a genetic bottleneck during the investigation followed by very rapid inhibition in radiation with adaptation to all climates, soils, pest diseases. Anything that's relevant to agriculture in different places imposing different selection pressures that resulted in appropriately adapted material. Which means material we now have, the diversity in our collection is relevant to future development. And what I've put up here is that this statement that the early farms could create so many normal desirable variants despite that bottleneck investigation how much more could we create? If we get rid of that bottleneck bringing more wild species denomes from that don't naturally cross with the agenomes and cross a wider range of the sativa varieties with each other we're going to be even more inventive than these farmers who have created sativa. This way it gets to the difficulties. So I've said all this diversity is relevant to agriculture. It's important we need it. It's going to be valuable so what happens is people see the money when money comes into the equation the logic tends to disappear you might view it because it's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow which will allow us to reach that new wonderful world where everyone is worthy and no one poor anymore or you may view the fat cat trying to run off with all the money themselves but whatever everyone has to be this affected us by the CDIR change process that was a point of which Akim got well he was affected by how much argument was going on at one stage he said the dispute over how gene mates are managed has taken more arguing time than anything else put together in CDIR and it's out of all proportion to the money that goes with it as you should have said it's not doing us any money but it is an indication of how much influence everyone attached to it the result is that CDIR consortium won the battle and took the gene bank the gene risk product 1.1.1 is funded not from risk but from a special sector of gene banks which has been set up because the CDIR decided that gene bank should be separated but this is not bad I don't know but that's the way consortium is I want to go a little bit at this age into rights because when money comes into it you've got to think through who has the right to what there's a lot of confusion about the differences between intellectual property rights and sovereign rights an intellectual property right is an inventor's temporary right to benefit from an invention for years it encouraged innovation whereas a sovereign right is a nation's permanent right not a temporary right it gives the nation rights over everything being anti-revolution being this has to protect countries from outside interference and this is supposed to illustrate an IG 101 the first slides of the introduction talk the idea of IG protection is it costs to develop a new product you have a period investment where you're not getting any return on your investment and it's only after you've produced your product you can start selling it in commercial and the idea is if you market it with IG protection you can get back your initial investment rapidly once you've got back your initial investment it should then go on to the free market you should lose your production that's why it's supposed to be temporary for a short period of time particularly for the process of like 20 years after a year you should have made a profit out of it you'll approve the right and then it comes really good with IG 101 maybe better to look at the other environment if you don't have IG protection that's a very strong disinventive to innovation here the inventor is making this big investment in developing a product but then it doesn't get any commercial advantage in selling it the copy is a great advantage the copy will just have a regular investment to copy that invention and then make the profit just the same as the inventive so it's the idea of IG protection is to remove this disincentive to innovation