<![CDATA[The International Moringa Germplasm Collection

<![CDATA[The International Moringa Germplasm Collection - IMGC Moringa Blog]]>Sat, 11 Apr 2020 08:42:32 -0500Weebly<![CDATA[Views of the Madagascar section]]>Thu, 15 Nov 2018 06:00:00 GMThttp://moringaceae.org/imgc-moringa-blog/views-of-the-madagascar-sectionBoth of the Malagasy species, Moringa drouhardii and Moringa hildebrandtii, are growing very well. Moringa drouhardii has been flowering and fruiting for several years, and M. hiledrandtii has started to do so this year. So, the plants are producing plenty of useful material for research.

The Madagascar secion in the dry season. The tallest plants are Moringa hildebrandtii.

Moringa drouhardii, with Achatocarpus (Achatocarpaceae) at right

The feathery leaves with slender leaflets of Moringa drouhardii. At left is a wild type Moringa oleifera.

The white, nearly radially symmetrical flowers of Moringa drouhardii. Some of the slender leaflets that characterize this species can also be seen.

Fruits of Moringa drouhardii.

Fruits of Moringa drouhardii

Moringa drouhardii usually have numerous branches that often become pendant with age.

Moringa drouhardii at left, Moringa hildebrandtii at right

Moringa drouhardii at right, Moringa ovalifolia at left

Moringa hildebrandtii (left), Moringa drouhardii (right)

Moringa drouhardii in full leaf. Bursera bicolor silhouetted at lower right.

Moringa drouhardii in the rain. The plant with the large leaves at lower left is Jatropha chamelensis.

Moringa drouhardii at left, and Moringa hildebrandtii at right. I collected a seedling of Moringa hildebrandtii in the village of Ambohimahavelona, Madagascar, in 1998. The plant grew so large in a greenhouse in California that I couldn't move it down to the Collection. The plant at right is from a small cutting of that plant.

]]><![CDATA[Where are the true Moringa concanensis?]]>Mon, 22 Oct 2018 05:00:00 GMThttp://moringaceae.org/imgc-moringa-blog/where-are-the-true-moringa-concanensisThe population of Moringa concanensis has recovered well from Hurricane Patricia a couple of years ago, and it is nice to see the leaves of this species, with their uncannily regular arrays of huge leaflets and long, whip-like terminal pinnae of the leaves. You can fairly easily see in these photos that there is no truth to the idea that Moringa concanensis has just 2-pinnate leaves; higher orders of pinnation are common in the species.

What has become clear as we have been able to grow out the plants and seeds is that there seems to be a lot of introgression from Moringa oleifera into Moringa concanensis. Depending on the source population, anywhere from a third to all of the supposed concanensis grow up to exhibit some to very many M. oleifera characteristics. These include fast growth (M. concanensis spends more time in a tuberous sapling phase than M. oleifera), early flowering (M. concanensis usually takes more time to flowering than M. oleifera), and leaves with small leaflets, à la Moringa oleifera.

All of these seeds came from wild populations, but the habitats of Moringa concanensis are now very small and surrounded by human settlements. And where there are humans in India, there are Moringa oleifera trees. So, it seems plausible that there is pollen flow from domesticated Moringa oleifera plants into the adjacent wild populations. None of the trees, even the seedlings, in the wild populations had oleifera like features. So, if there are hybrid seeds being produced in wild populations, presumably natural selection eliminates the more oleifera-like individuals. But in the coddled conditions of the germplasm collection, they are free to grow to adulthood.

That oleifera hybrids seem common in seeds from wild Moringa concanensis localities raises the question of how much gene flow is occurring across India from Moringa oleifera into Moringa concanensis and what effects this gene flow might be having on wild Moringa concanensis populations.

Moringa concanensis flowers have a pink cast on the bases of the petals and sepals.

In addition to their pink bases, the petals and sepals of Moringa concanensis are usually narrower than the usually paler flowers of Moringa oleifera

A rare cloudy day silhouettes the large leaflets, long terminal pinnae, and clearly 3+ pinnate leaves of Moringa concanensis.

Moringa concanensis spends a much longer time as a slender sapling with an underground tuber than Moringa oleifera does. Like its relative Moringa peregrina, Moringa concanensis can spend years without a permanent stem, dying back each dry season to the underground tuber.

The seed of this tree was collected from a Moringa concanensis in Rajasthan. It grew up to reveal numerous oleifera-like characteristics, not least of which include its growth rate. This tree is the same age as the Moringa concanensis sapling in the photo above.

]]><![CDATA[New postdoc, Eapsa Berry, working on moringa for a year]]>Fri, 31 Aug 2018 05:00:00 GMThttp://moringaceae.org/imgc-moringa-blog/new-postdoc-eapsa-berry-working-on-moringa-for-a-yearWe are very lucky to have in the lab for a year Dr. Eapsa Berry, who recently got her PhD in the lab of Dr. R. Geeta in the Department of Botany at the University of Delhi. Eapsa is here on a postdoctoral fellowship from the Mexican Agency for International Cooperation. Eapsa is using Moringa oleifera as one of her study plants in a project that attempts to understand how plants resist drought, and why climate change induced drought is killing trees outright or lowering their heights worldwide. She is focusing on the relationship between leaves, which provide food for the plant, and the living parts of the stem and root, which consume the food produced by the leaves, but also bring water to the leaves. The relationship between living stem and leaf tissue should be an absolutely crucial one in shaping how plants face drought, but very little is known about this relationship. It isn’t an easy one to study, so Eapsa is doing truly pioneering work in developing techniques for measuring the volume of metabolically active tissue in stems, and then relating these volumes to leaf mass and area. She is using trusty Moringa oleifera as well as castor bean plants as her test plants. More on her work and its importance as she progresses, but this promises to be work of very high relevance for thinking about plant evolution in general.

Eapsa learning to make tortillas

]]><![CDATA[Garima working in the collection for 6 months]]>Wed, 15 Aug 2018 05:00:00 GMThttp://moringaceae.org/imgc-moringa-blog/garima-working-in-the-collection-for-6-monthsGarima is the PhD student at the University of Delhi working on the distribution of genetic variation within wild and cultivated Moringa oleifera across the Indian subcontinent. Garima got a scholarship from the Mexican Agency for International Cooperation to carry out a 6-month visit to the collection. Garima’s project involves using detailed measurements of leaves to figure out how to tell apart wild versus cultivated Moringa oleifera. In addition, she is using genetic sequence data to figure out how wild type Moringa oleifera, domestic Moringa oleifera, and the various populations of Moringa concanensis are related to one another. Together, this project should give us a very good idea about the wild ancestor of the cultivated Moringa oleifera. At this point, it isn’t clear. Current opinion is that the wild populations in NW India, which are called “Moringa oleifera” are the wild ancestor. However, these plants look and act very differently from domestic Moringa oleifera. That wild plants should differ strongly from their domesticated descendants is not unheard of—for example, no one looking a the small, unapalatable wild maize would ever dream of the huge, succulent cobs of domesticated corn. But the domestic oleifera is in many ways more similar to Moringa concanensis than it is to the supposedly wild type M. oleifera. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if M. oleifera turned out to be domesticated from M. concanensis. Or, perhaps the wild M. oleifera is lost in the depth of time, with only its remarkable descendant still among us. Whatever the case, Garima’s data will be a major advance in our understanding, and we are very pleased to have the chance to host her here.

Garima photographing moringa leaves in the collection. She photographs the leaves on a white background with a scale marked on it. She uses these images to quantify differences between domestic and wild Moringa oleifera.

]]><![CDATA[Moringa in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA: new publication from the Collection]]>Thu, 19 Jul 2018 05:00:00 GMThttp://moringaceae.org/imgc-moringa-blog/moringa-in-proceedings-of-the-national-academy-of-sciences-of-the-usa-new-publication-from-the-collectionIn addition to being a nutritious food, having nutraceutical benefits, and being an all around fantastic multipurpose tree, Moringa oleifera is also a very good system for studying how plants move water from roots to their leaves. Geneticists have used fast-growing fruit flies for their experiments, because with short fruit fly life cycles, it’s possible to carry out complex breeding experiments in a short time. Because it grows so fast, Moringa oleifera is a kind of tree version of the fruit fly. What other tree can you think of that easily grows 8 m tall in its first year, flowering and fruiting to boot? This means that we can use moringa to produce samples just right for addressing important questions about why plants die during droughts, among other questions.

I a recent paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, we used Moringa oleifera as one of our model plants to study the relationship between plant height, water-conducting conduit diameter, and drought vulnerability. We note that “As trees worldwide experience mortality or dieback with increasing drought and low tundras grow taller with warming, understanding the link between plant height and climate is increasingly important. We show that taller plants have predictably wider water-conducting conduits, and that wider conduits within species are more vulnerable to conduction-blocking embolisms. These two observations suggest that tall plants in formerly moist areas die because their wide conduits are excessively vulnerable under novel drought conditions. Also, the cold that limits conduit diameter, and therefore height, in tundra plants is relaxed under warming, permitting wider conduits and taller plants. That plant height appears linked to climate via plant hydraulics helps explain why vegetation height differs across biomes and is altering with climate change.”

Drought experiments continue in moringa and we’ll keep you posted. You can read our recent paper here.

Olson, M. E., D. Soriano, J. A. Rosell, T. Anfodillo, M. J. Donoghue, E. J. Edwards, C. León-Gómez, T. Dawson, J. J. Camarero Martínez, M. Castorena, A. Echeverría, C. I. Espinosa, A. Fajardo, A. Gazol, S. Isnard, R. S. Lima, C. R. Marcati, and R. Méndez-Alonzo. 2018. Plant height and hydraulic vulnerability to drought and cold. PNAS doi 10.1073/pnas.1721728115 article pdf supporting information dataset

Moringas part of a drought experiment

]]><![CDATA[Indomitable Moringas]]>Wed, 06 Jun 2018 05:00:00 GMThttp://moringaceae.org/imgc-moringa-blog/indomitable-moringasI took this photo of a moringa in the local dump near the Moringa collection. It is symbolic of moringa- doesn’t ask for much, happy and generous despite amid harshness.

]]><![CDATA[First fruits of Moringa hildebrandtii in the collection]]>Tue, 15 May 2018 05:00:00 GMThttp://moringaceae.org/imgc-moringa-blog/first-fruits-of-moringa-hildebrandtii-in-the-collectionThose accustomed to Moringa oleifera, which flowers in its first six months from seed, are often surprised that the other species take a few years before they start to flower and fruit. Most of our M. hildebrandtii individuals were planted from seed in 2013. One got knocked over by Hurricane Patricia in 2015, and like many trees when they think they are about to die, that indivdual flowered, a gambit at least to get some pollen out into the world. No other individuals were flowering, so no fruits came from those flowers, though the first photographs I am aware of of the flowers of Moringa hildebrandtii. See those photos here.

The standing individuals continued to take their time, and started to flower in December 2017. They have been flowering on and off ever since and have had fruits with viable seed all year.

The yellow cast in the crown of Moringa hildebrandtii is made by the inflorescences.

Inflorescences in the crown of Moringa hildebrandtii

Inflorescences of Moringa hildebrandtii just below an emerging flush of leaves

Moringa hildebrandtii is easy to tell apart from the other species of Moringa native to Madagascar because Moringa hildebrandtii has yellowish rather than white flowers, and the leaflets are very wide rather than very narrow.

The large seeds with narrow wings of Moringa hildebrandtii are borne in long fruits with marked constrictions between the seeds.

Abundant fruits on Moringa hildebrandtii as the summer rainy season extends into early fall.

]]><![CDATA[New publication from the Collection: Wild versus cultivated Indian Moringas taste different and have different glucosinolate profiles]]>Sun, 22 Apr 2018 05:00:00 GMThttp://moringaceae.org/imgc-moringa-blog/new-publication-from-the-collection-wild-versus-cultivated-indian-moringas-taste-different-and-have-different-glucosinolate-profilesCan the anti-cancer glucosinolates of Moringa be altered under selection to produce more potent or more palatable varieties? One way of finding out is to compare domestic Moringa oleifera to its putative wild ancestor (more on the “putative” in a moment).

This is what we did in a new paper just out in Scientific Reports. We compared the glucosinolate profiles of a range of domestic Moringa oleifera with those of a range of individuals representing the wild type from eastern Pakistan and northwestern India. We found that the two entities have very different glucosinolate profiles. The wild type has high levels of glucosoonjnain and low levels of glucomoringin. Glucomoringin is the best-known glucosinolate in Moringa and the one that M. oleifera is best known for because it appears to underwrite that species’ health benefits such as cancer chemoprotection, lowering blood pressure, and helping regulate glucose levels in diabetic people. Glucosoonjnain is the new glucosinolate we discovered this year, and it is present in M. oleifera but in low levels. Instead, M. oleifera has high levels of glucomoringin.

We gave samples of the two species to a panel of tasters, without telling them which was which. They scored them on whether they tasted bad or not; wild type Moringa oleifera was scored as statistically significantly bad tasting. So, if the entity that is currently regarded as the wild ancestor of Moringa oleifera really is its ancestor, then it seems likely that its glucosinolate profile was radically altered under selection, possibly because glucosoonjnain tastes bad.

I inject doubt about ancestry because our fieldwork in India is making me wonder whether what is currently regarded as wild type Moringa oleifera really is related to the domestic, or whether it might not be a different and more distantly related species. Molecular and morphological analyses in process will tell. In the meantime, you can read our paper here:

Chodur GM, ME Olson, KL Wade, KK Stephenson, W Nouman, JW Fahey. 2018. Wild and domesticated Moringa oleifera differ in taste, glucosinolate composition, and antioxidant potential, but not myrosinase activity or protein content. Scientific Reports 8 (1), 7995. pdf

The chemical structures of glucomoringin, the most common glucosinolate in domestic Moringa oleifera, and glucosoonjnain, the most common glucosinolate in "wild type" Morigna oleifera

]]><![CDATA[New publication from the Collection: Glucosinolate diversity across Moringaceae]]>Mon, 12 Mar 2018 06:00:00 GMThttp://moringaceae.org/imgc-moringa-blog/new-publication-from-the-collection-glucosinolate-diversity-across-moringaceaeCenturies of traditional use, an increasing number of studies in animal and cultured cell studies, and close molecular analogues with better-studied plants strongly suggest that Moringa oleifera can help prevent cancer. The substances mainly responsible for this effect are called isothiocyanates. Isothiocyanates are stored as stable precursors in the form of glucosinolates. When an insect or other herbivore breaks a part of the plant, the glucosinolates come into contact with enzymes store in other cells, and these cleave the glucusoinolates and liberate isiothiocyanates, the substances that give moringa its piquancy. You can read more about glucosinolates in this post.

Glucosinolates are exciting for many reasons. The best-studied one, suforaphane, greatly boosts the levels of phase 2 detoxification enzymes. These are the enzymes that remove harmful molecules from the body once the body has made them water-soluble. This is what gives these substances their anti-cancer chemoprotective ability. These substances also seem to have antiinflammatory, glucoregulatory, and hypotensive effects, among others. So, understandably, they are of great health interest.

Most studies in Moringa have been carried out on M. oleifera, and of these, most have been carried out only on a small number of variants. What is more, there is no rhyme or reason to the selection of the variants. Instead, researchers tend to grab whatever moringa they happen to have growing close to the lab. So, a major question is to what degree glucosinolates vary across the family, and whether there are any species that are more potent than Moringa oleifera in their chemoprotective effects.

Our new paper just out in Scientific Reports (Fahey et al. 2018) canvasses 12 of the 13 known species of Moringa to see how diverse the glucosinolates are in terms of their molecular structure. We found lots of previously unknown glucosinolates, including one in the well-studied Moringa oleifera. It was very abundant in wild-type M. oleifera (though as I have mentioned before I am starting to have doubts that what is currently regarded as wild M. oleifera really is M. oleifera), though we found it later in M. oleifera and other species too. Here is how we describe its naming: “One of these compounds, 4-(-L-glucopyranosyloxy)benzyl GS (4GBGS), is very abundant in the wild type of M. oleifera, and because we rst found it in this species, we name it after this taxon. The most abundant glucosinolate in M. oleifera is known as glucomoringin. Our name employs a parallel construction based on the common name of the wild type of M. oleifera in its area of natural occurrence. Though the putative wild type of M. oleifera is grown widely across eastern Pakistan and lowland northern India from Haryana, Punjab, and Jammu and Kashmir east to Bihar [Garima, Olson, and Nouman unpublished observation], it is native only to a small area. is area is found only on the Punjab-Himachal Pradesh border in northwestern India where the most frequent common name for the plant is “soonjna.” We assign the common name for this glucosinolate as “glucosoonjnain.” “

We found plenty of other compounds, including a weird, small glucosinolate in the weird, small species Morigna longituba.

The most amazing finding had to do with phase 2 response induction potency. Remember that glucosinolates/isothiocyanates induce the production of anti-cancer chemoprotective enzymes. So, given the variation in glucosinolates across the family, we wanted to know how much variation there was in phase 2 response, using cultured mouse cells. We found that Moringa oleifera was indeed a very good inducer of the phase 2 response, but Moringa arborea was off the charts. This is significant because it gives hope that variants of M. oleifera with higher phase 2 response can be developed: if they can be achieved in one species, it makes it seem more likely that it can be achieved in another. But it also highlights the precarious nature of the poor knowledge and conservation status of Moringa species and tropical biodiversity in general. Moringa arborea is known from a single remote canyon on the Kenya-Ethiopia border. It was discovered in 1972 and lost to science until I found it again in 1998. It has never been seen since. Think of that: one of the world’s most potent anti-cancer plants has only been seen twice, and no one has seen it in 20 years.

You can read our paper here:

Fahey JW, ME Olson, KK Stephenson, KL Wade, GM Chodur, D Odee. 2018. The Diversity of Chemoprotective Glucosinolates in Moringaceae (Moringa spp.) Scientific Reports 8 (1), 7994. pdf

The diversity of glucosinolates found across the family. The best studied one, and the one most abundant in Moringa oleifera and apparently responsible for many of its health benefits, is the compound labeled 1, at top.

This diagram shows how the different glucosinolates are distributed in leaves, seeds, and leaf gland exudates with respect to the moringa phylogeny (at left). There isn't much tendency for closely related species to resemble one another. This means that it's hard to predict the properties of one species based on the properties of another. This, in turn, means that it's very important to conserve and study all of the species.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in this study was the off-the-charts activity of Moringa arborea. This graph shows that Moringa arborea, the dot at upper right, has way higher levels of glucomoringin than any other species. It also suggests that glucomoringin is involved in Moringa's phase 2 response potency, as assayed by a test in mouse cells. The X axis is an index of this phase 2 induction potential.

]]><![CDATA[What goes on in the center of a Moringa trunk? Matiss Castorena’s surprising results]]>Sat, 17 Feb 2018 06:00:00 GMThttp://moringaceae.org/imgc-moringa-blog/what-goes-on-in-the-center-of-a-moringa-trunk-matiss-castorenas-surprising-resultsIf you cut a sample of wood out of the center of a large moringa trunk, you will find cells that are filled with water and starch, often with visible nuclei. These are all usually signs of living cells. So, I, and a lot of other people, had always assumed that plants with low wood density like moringas were very busy metabolically inside their wood. Trees vary from having very low density wood, like balsa (or moringa) to very heavy, like ebony or the various things called ironwood. Wood density is largely caused by how thick the cell walls in the wood are. Woods with high density have thick cell walls and, as a result, little space inside the cells for water, starch, and other cell contents. Woods with low density have very thin cell walls, leaving lots of space inside the cells. Because the cells of low density wooded species have more living protoplasm, it would seem natural to assume that they have more metabolic activity going on per unit wood volume than high density wooded species.

Matiss Castorena, then a Master’s student in my lab and now working on his PhD in Brian Enquist’s lab at the University of Arizona-Tucson, showed that this is not the case. He sampled a very wide range of species, ranging from very high wood densities to very low densities. He focused a special amount of detail on a large Moringa stenopetala here at the collection, to get a detailed idea of what goes on metabolically speaking from the periphery of the trunk to the inside, and along the length of, the fat trunk of this water-storing Moringa species. What Matiss found was very surprising.

He found that the species with the lowest wood densities, including moringas, have very low metabolic activity in the wood, and the area of metabolically active cells tapers off very quickly when moving from the cambium (the embryonic cells that produce wood, just below the bark) toward the center of the tree. The inner cells might not be dead, but they aren’t doing much in the way of metabolism either. He found that species with high wood density have much higher metabolic activity at the periphery of their stems, and that this metabolic activity tapers off slowly when moving into the center of the trunk.

He proposed the following scenario to explain this pattern. Woods of low density such as moringa are cheap for plants to produce. Because their cells are large and their cells walls are thin, they require very little cellulose, which is made out of glucose molecules that the plants make with carbon dioxide taken out of the air during photosynthesis. After spending their carbon fixed during photosynthesis on a given volume of wood, low-density wooded plants can fix a similar amount of carbon via photosynthesis in their leaves fairly quickly. In other words, species like Moringa with low-density wood recuperate the costs of their investments in wood quickly. High wood density species, though, take a much longer time to fix the carbon necessary for a given volume of wood than low density wooded species. In other words, species with high wood density take longer to recuperate the costs of their investments.

This means, Matiss reasoned, that species with high wood density need to keep their cells in top working order longer, long enough to recuperate their carbon costs. The cellular machinery that keeps genetic material, proteins, and membranes intact is metabolically expensive. Since high wood density species need to keep their cells ship-shape longer, their greater need for cellular housekeeping would explain why their metabolic activities are higher than low wood density species. Low wood density species have nearly throw-away wood. They fix new amounts of carbon equivalent to a given wood volume very quickly. Rather than carefully maintaining existing wood, these species simply produce more wood, that is, keep growing. This jibes with everyone’s experience with moringa: when have you ever seen a faster-growing tree?

So, what is going on inside the trunk of a moringa? Very little in metabolic terms. The large amounts of starch and water might mean that occasionally these are mobilized in pulses of metabolic activity, perhaps to fuel flowering in the dry season, but in general, moringas produce cheap wood, and rather than maintaining it metabolically active, simply continue to replace it. So, moringas are furiously fast growers, but apart from the rapid activity close to the cambium where new wood is being produced, they are quite slow-moving when it comes to the metabolic rates of individual cells. Matiss should have these results published soon!

Test tubes where Matiss incubates his metabolic activity assays

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