• Heritable genome-wide variation of gene expression and promoter methylation between wild and domesticated chickens. Domestication was Lamarckian.
• Global economy interacts with climate change to jeopardize species conservation: the case of the greater flamingo in the Mediterranean and West Africa. Financial crisis leads to closing down of Mediterranean saltpans, which is not good news for flamingo. Climate change doesn’t help. Must be similar examples for plants, Shirley.
• Parallel Evolution Under Domestication and Phenotypic Differentiation of the Cultivated Subspecies of Cucurbita pepo (Cucurbitaceae). C. pepo subsp. pepo and subsp. texana underwent similar genotypic and phenotypic changes during domestication.
• Ecological and human impacts on stand density and distribution of tamarind (Tamarindus indica L.) in Senegal. Climate change will lead to an area of currently low density in the NW being a refugium. Connectivity problems will ensue.
• Biofortification of wheat through inoculation of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria and cyanobacteria. Breeders give up.
• Nutritional ranking of 30 Brazilian genotypes of cowpeas including determination of antioxidant capacity and vitamins. Breeders take heart.
• A short history of Lagenaria siceraria (bottle gourd) in the Roman provinces: morphotypes and archaeogenetics. Out of Asia. And more.
• Functional Properties, Nutritional Value, and Industrial Applications of Niger Oilseeds (Guizotia abyssinica Cass.). It has them, in spades, as this paper summarises.
• Sex at the origin: an Asian population of the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae reproduces sexually. The Himalayan foothills would seem to be the place where to look for resistance.
• Evolutionary History of Pearl Millet (Pennisetum glaucum [L.] R. Br.) and Selection on Flowering Genes since Its Domestication. Bayesian modelling of 20 random genes supports domestication about 4,800 years ago, with protracted introgression from the wild relative, and selection sweeps suggest flowering related genes unsurprisingly underwent strong selection as the crop spread southward. But a single domestication scenario? Anyway, sounds familiar, doesn’it.
• Genome-Wide Analysis of the World’s Sheep Breeds Reveals High Levels of Historic Mixture and Strong Recent Selection. Much like, ahem, pearl millet. For flowering genes, read horniness genes. The bit about an initially broad sampling of diversity sounds a bit like the horse. Who out there is going to synthesize all this domestication stuff? Not that I’m looking for a meta-narrative, mind.
• Ultra-barcoding in cacao (Theobroma spp.; Malvaceae) using whole chloroplast genomes and nuclear ribosomal DNA. Well, sequence the whole thing and be done with it is what I say, why flaff around with ultra-this and super-that?
• The crop yield gap between organic and conventional agriculture. 20%.
• Marcela, a promising medicinal and aromatic plant from Latin America: A review. Achyrocline satureioides, in the Asteraceae. Yeah, I never heard of it either. But these guys say it’ll make you rich and beautiful.
• Comparative genetic structure within single-origin pairs of rice (Oryza sativa L.) landraces from in situ and ex situ conservation programs in Yunnan of China using microsatellite markers. 2-5 times more unique alleles in the in situ version of various landraces compared to the ex situ version, collected in 1980. But same number of common alleles.
• Mutualism breakdown in breadfruit domestication. More recent cultivars have less abundant and less species-rich arbuscular mycorrhizas.

This just in from Alex Lyon, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He She and some friends are planning a symposium for graduate students interested in plant breeding and seed systems for organic agriculture, and he she asked us to help get the word out. Happy to do so.

We are inviting applications from graduate students in plant breeding and related programs for the first Student Organic Seed Symposium. The event will be held at the Lakeview Inn in Greensboro, Vermont, from August 5 – August 8, 2012. Hosted by High Mowing Organic Seeds and organized by students from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, the Student Organic Seed Symposium aspires to build a community of graduate students interested in plant breeding and seed systems for organic agriculture.

For more information, please visit here.

Space is limited — Funding is available — Applications are due February 15, 2012!

We hope to see you in Vermont!

• 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?

• 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?

• Mike Jackson gets himself a pulpit. Welcome to the blogosphere, Mike!
• More on the Filipino ex-genebank.
• What they grew in an ancient Israelite garden. Can they really tell Citrus species apart from their pollen?
• More American maps to mashup with obesity and food insecurity: land use, renewable energy sources…. I do hope someone is keeping track. Even of the more esoteric stuff, of course, like the names of softdrinks.
• Yet more on horse domestication.
• Another organic farming externality for your consideration. Thanks, Robert.
• ILRI gets innovative on this whole training thing.
• “The future of chocolate” revealed.
• Boffins look at fossil bison epigenetics to investigate adaptation to climate change. What will they think of next. Well, applying it to chickens, for a start.
• Other boffins move potato anti-nematode genes into bananas. No word on the epigenetics of it all.
• Indian report on how to strengthen role of agriculture in nutrition.
• Kew has money for fieldwork.
• Cleaning messy taxonomic data. Useful in Genebank Database Hell?

• Predators hunt for a balanced diet. So it’s not just people?
• Seeds of High Asia. Saudi Aramco World gives respect to the seed hunters.
• Obscure crops and an obscure book. Dorian Fuller gives respect to the neglected.
• “For the time being, I genuinely believe we must maintain yield growth, but we need to ensure that we preserve the natural capital for the future.” UK Food Security Czar speaks.
• Indian PM mea culpa on malnutrition. Will he listen to the above? Would it help?
• Beer in Ireland. Not Guinness. I may be gone some time.
• Nordics discuss AnGR and climate change. Successfully, natch.
• Prosecco runs to the IPR ramparts.
• Video on growing Artemisia to fight poverty.
• Help the CGIAR with its tagline. Beyond irony.

Today: Connections Edition, in which we pick low-hanging fruit, think outside the box, and join up the dots.

• The return of a US bumblebee. Is it due to climate change?
• “These foods have meaning” for a Native American tribe (and for Africans for that matter). So will they be able to check out their seeds? And sequence the hell out of them, like rice?
• If you want to harvest palm heart sustainably in the Colombian Andes, only take 10% of any population a year. Is cultivation an option?
• Trees are dying in the Sahel. And yet boffins don’t know how to kill them. No word on what the grass is doing.
• Vegetables and nutrition: the theory and the practice. Of course, a lot of them are grown in cities.
• Why is so much fish made into fishmeal rather than eaten? Location, location, location. Of markets, that is. Kind of like for milk.

• Visit Cuba with boffins of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens. Well that sounds like fun.
• You liked naked oats? Get a load of naked pumpkins. Comments disabled for Manitoba farmers.
• Psst, wanna genebank data management system? Only slightly used…
• Something else you can blame your beer belly on: wheat.
• Have your forest and eat it too.
• Solving malnutrition in Zambia. I wanna know more about those “improved seed varieties.”
• And about these too for that matter: “…ICARDA is urgently sending to Libya seeds of wheat, barley, legume and forage crops for the 2011-2012 cropping season…” Incidentally, any news about the Agricultural Research Centre in Tripoli?
• Forest certification helps nearby Heritage Sites.

• Crops for the Future finds a nice ricebean project.
• The wheats of Afghanistan.
• A former ICRISAT intern speaks. The world listens.
• Collecting the Happy Tree of China.
• Global water stress maps. Does CCAFS know? Or care?
• Rodale hearts organic.

• Cytological and Molecular Characterization of Homoeologous Group-1 Chromosomes in Hybrid Derivatives of a Durum Disomic Alien Addition Line. Getting tolerance to Fusarium head blight into durum wheat ain’t easy.
• Sustainable, low-input, warm-season, grass–legume grassland mixtures: mission (nearly) impossible? Apparently really difficult to find native North America legume forage species tolerant of both freezing and high temperatures, but people are looking. Gotta wonder if it’s a problem elsewhere too. Ethiopian highlands?
• Diversity of different farmer and modern wheat varieties cultivated in contrasting organic farming conditions in western Europe and implications for European seed and variety legislation. Strong selection for uniformity (for regulation) is not reflected in uniformity assessed on farm. And farmer varieties were good outside their region of origin.
• Glycaemic index of three Indian rice varieties. All three the same, high, GI. So, “There is an urgent need to study the GI of other commonly consumed rice varieties and to develop rice of a lower GI value”. Er, right.
• Glycemic indices of five varieties of dates in healthy and diabetic subjects. All five the same, low, GI and no difference in diabetics.
• Agricultural expansion and the fate of global conservation priorities. Conservation needs to think about agriculture.
• Which habitats of European importance depend on agricultural practices? 63 of them, mainly through grazing and mowing.
• Centennial olive trees as a reservoir of genetic diversity. Only about 10% of old trees matched current cultivars.
• Phenotypic Changes in Different Spinach Varieties Grown and Selected under Organic Conditions. There were phenotypic changes after just three seasons of selection, in one case resulting in a “new” variety.
• Open-Pollinated vs. Hybrid Maize Cultivars. Hybrids are not the only way to improve maize productivity, apparently.
• Plant breeding for harmony between agriculture and the environment. “Plant breeding can be a powerful tool to bring “harmony” between agriculture and the environment, but partnerships between plant breeders, ecologists, urban planners, and policy makers are needed to make this a reality.” I was just going to ask, why can’t we all just get along.

Don’t forget the open Mendeley group for the papers we link to here. Even if you don’t use Mendeley, you can subscribe to the RSS feed from the group and get stuff that way.