• Yale University magazine drinks the fast-track breeding KoolAid panacea.
• Compare and contrast. Repeat. Endlessly.
• Grafting tomatoes is hot for lots of reasons; but how does it protect against leaf-borne diseases? And not just tomatoes, actually.
• Getting the lowdown on that “food sovereignty” farrago.
• And today’s DNA sequencing will solve world hunger and cure bunions story.
• Genomics also good for “health, agriculture, livestock, fisheries and biodiversity” in Philippines. Have we forgotten anything?
• Well yeah, you forgot your handy molecular toolkit.
• Meanwhile, back in the real world, the choice is between forests and yaks.
• More hard choices: evotourism destinations. But check it out, there be agricultural biodiversity too!
• And another one: to go to the International Sandalwood Symposium, or not to go?

We’re of course all holding our breath, are we not, over the imminent appearance of the American Journal of Botany Special Issue on what next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies mean for the plant sciences. A few teasers are already out on the journal’s website, and it looks like the papers will come out in piecemeal fashion over the next weeks, and months for all I know. The paper that’s most relevant to us here is perhaps that of Susan McCouch and others on NGS and genebanks. I saw an early version of it, but am not allowed to share it, so until it comes out officially, here’s a taster from the introduction to the volume as a whole by Ashley N. Egan, Jessica Schlueter and David M. Spooner. I trust the journal will consider it fair use and not come after us with their lawyers.

A total of 1750 national and international gene banks worldwide preserve ~7 million accessions of advanced cultivars, landraces, and wild species relatives of plants that the world depends on for food, fiber, and fuel (FAO, 2010 ). McCouch et al. (2012) present a vision for the potential of large-scale genotyping to help characterize, use, and manage gene bank collections, from their perspectives as scientists working with large-scale rice collections. Genebanks have many pressing challenges due to the large size of their collections and the need to characterize them properly for a wide variety of users. They also face legal constraints (and opportunities) imposed in today’s climate of ownership of genetic resources. The challenges include the need to correctly identify accessions, track seed lots, varieties, and alleles, identify and eliminate duplicate accessions, justify adding new accessions to the collection, identify a small subset of the collection that represents a majority of the variation in the entire collection (a “core collection”), identify geographic areas holding useful sets of diverse alleles, associate genotypes with phenotypes, and motivate innovative collaborations to place useful materials into the hands of plant breeders. McCouch et al. (2012) outline these challenges and show how NGS can vastly improve genetic characterization efforts in genebanks. Initial NGS projects with the rice collections include identification of SNPs and other polymorphisms (http://www.oryzasnp. org/; http://www.ricediversity.org/; http://www.ricesnp.org/) based on large-scale resequencing and genotyping projects.

Back with a full discussion (and a comparison with the paper on the same subject in a recent Brainfood) when the publication is online.

• The annual Wageningen agrobiodiversity conservation course is in India this year. Hannes says it’s really good.
• AVRDC’s veggie seed kits are a hit in Orissa.
• CIMMYT swimming in data. Waving, not drowning.
• IRRI not doing badly either. But “quantitative train loci” is a new one on me.
• Australia thinking about introducing elephants. Yeah because that sort of thing has been such a success in the past.
• Well, actually, with sheep, I suppose it has, in a way. And the genetics says breeders have a lot of diversity to play with still.
• Your mama is a llama.
• The Island of Dogs has crop wild relatives. No, not the one in London.
• Cuba goes for new urban crops. And not for the first time, Shirley. But what about the old ones?
• Quick, duck! This piece has been rather a hit for me over on Facebook.
• VII International Symposium on Artichoke, Cardoon and Their Wild Relatives: The (Very Expensive) Book.
• Food sovereignty “started in New England”. Huh? And proponents “want to eat and sell the food they grow free from interference from state and federal regulators”. Huh?

• Effects of Introducing Threatened Falcons into Vineyards on Abundance of Passeriformes and Bird Damage to Grapes. Potential savings of US$234/ha for Sauvignon Blanc, more for Pinot Noir.
• Genetic characterization and gene flow in different geographical-distance neighbouring natural populations of wild soybean (Glycine soja Sieb. & Zucc.) and implications for protection from GM soybeans. There is a small amount of outcrossing, which decreases with distance. GM crops should be grown far from wild populations, certainly more than 1.5km. And we can work out better ways to collect for ex situ conservation.
• Phylogenetic relationships, interspecific hybridization and origin of some rare characters of wild soybean in the subgenus Glycine soja in China. Intermediate forms are closer to the wild than the cultivated species.
• Mitochondrial genomes from modern horses reveal the major haplogroups that underwent domestication. A diversity of maternal lines were domesticated about 150,000 years ago, leading to about 18 modern haplogroups. One of them is only found in the only remaining wild horse, E. przewalskii.

• Big grant for TC Dublin to create DNA matrix of ancient livestock, will identify parchments too.
• Kew unites Augustine Henry’s letters with the objects and specimens he collected; agrobiodiversity included.

• Genetic structure and diversity of India hybrid tea. It’s complicated. It’s important because the success of tea outside its core are is due to hybridization between Indian and Chinese types in Assam starting in 1875. It’s limited.
• NGS technologies for analyzing germplasm diversity in genebanks. That’s Next-Generation Sequencing. Can be used to “identify patterns of genetic diversity, map quantitative traits and mine novel alleles.” Recommendation is for “genotyping by sequencing” to be applied stepwise, starting with a core collection. That’ll be complicated, but the real bottleneck will be the phenotyping.
• The role and influence of grandmothers on child nutrition: culturally designated advisors and caregivers. Wise up, nutrition advocates. You are, apparently, ignoring egg-suckers, a primary force for good.
• The importance of eating local: slaughter and scurvy in Antarctic cuisine. Who needs oranges when you have fresh penguin at hand?
• Islands and streams: clusters and gene flow in wild barley populations from the Levant. There is ecogeographic patterning in the wild material, once you remove the effect of recent admixture with cultivated barley. Geneflow is more N to S than vice versa.
• Global change belowground: impacts of elevated CO2, nitrogen, and summer drought on soil food webs and biodiversity. It’s complex, really complex; increased CO2 and N may result in new, simpler belowground assemblages.
• Rice and Language Across Asia: Crops, Movement, and Social Change. An entire issue of Rice journal.

• Microbiologist makes Guardians of Microbial Diversity award. Agromicrobes awaited.
• Fabulous giant new superinteresting megablog scheduled to launch today. No RSS. Yet?
• Who likes which yams (by which they mean Dioscorea) in Madagascar? Kew will have answers.
• Genetic diversity invades the zeitgeist, or something.
• Or would you prefer something a little more down to earth?
• Oldest ploughed fields in Czech lands.
• Crazy mixed up report on this weeks new genebank, in Oman Qatar. “Up to 10,000 genes”? Be still my beating heart.
• Ich bin ein coco-de-mer-nut.
• Heat speeds up wheat aging. I know how it feels.
• A “Starbucks Of Tortillas”? Sounds worse than it is.
• Welcome news of fundamental work on a “minor” millet.
• IITA goes to jail.
• Genetically modifying cannabis to make it safe to eat. Such a bad idea. On so many levels.

• Big new project on farm animal genomics. Gene-jockeys lick lips.
• Big new push to raise money for the Moringa Fund. Agroforesters lick lips.
• Big new hardiness zone map unleashed by USDA on unsuspecting world. American GIS people and gardeners lick lips.
• Bill Gates mentions cassava. CIAT licks lips.

• Dogs were first domesticated animal. But the love affair is cooling off, at least for some breeds.
• Building capacity for animal genetic resources use, and for conservation and sustainable use under the ITPGRFA. And tree domestication. Is someone keeping track?
• BGI continues to take over DNA world.
• And the Worst Plant Virus Oscar goes to…
• How PNG farmers cope with drought. From what is developing into a really useful blog.
• I wish I had time to read 200 pages on ancient Athenian food. But maybe you do?
• Learn about the USDA potato collection, including lots of wild relatives.
• The tree that thinks it’s a supermarket: Moringa in the limelight again.

• Land, Food, and Biodiversity. Agriculture will expand, but that is bad for biodiversity. It probably must expand, actually, but this can be kept to a minimum by addressing land-use planning, governance and law enforcement, productivity, and market drivers. Oil palm as an example.
• Time to change how we describe biodiversity. By finally tackling the digitization of phenome annotations, apparently. NiM
• Genomic and metabolic prediction of complex heterotic traits in hybrid maize. Amazingly, genotype (SNP) can predict phenotype (biomass traits) pretty well. But in a population where a bunch of dents were crossed with a couple of testers. Will it work with a diverse genebank collection of landraces?
• Forest productivity increases with evenness, species richness and trait variation: a global meta-analysis. In over 50 studies, polycultures come out about 24% better than monocultures, with evenness having more of an effect than richness. Much more commentary and context at ConservationBytes.com. Compare with that recent drylands diversity and ecosystem function paper.
• All Is Not Loss: Plant Biodiversity in the Anthropocene. A model says there have been “gains in exotics caused by species invasions and the introduction of agricultural domesticates and ornamental exotic plants”. Oooh! Contrarian!