- Floral Transcriptome Sequencing for SSR Marker Development and Linkage Map Construction in the Tea Plant (Camellia sinensis). Neat, to be sure, but not entirely clear why the transcriptome of a part of a crop that is not economically exploited should be of more than academic use to anyone. But no doubt someone will set us right on this.
- Emergence of Agriculture in the Foothills of the Zagros Mountains of Iran. Eastern Fertile Crescent just as important as western.
- Analysis of main agronomic characteristics and utilization status of rice resources in Hunan Province. Hunan has a provincial genebank with more than 12,000 accession, “repetition eliminated.”
- The comparison of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and the Nagoya Protocol. Like the above, this is in Chinese, except for the abstract, which recommends ratification of both relevant instruments. I hope someone is listening.
- Biodiversity of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal fungi in Agricultural crops of western Himalayas. Everybody’s at it. Well, almost.
- Assessment of breeding progress in sugar beet by testing old and new varieties under greenhouse and field conditions. It has been steady and is set to continue. At least in Germany.
- Why crop yields in developing countries have not kept pace with advances in agronomy. Let them eat German sugar beets. But seriously: agronomist says it’s about the agronomy.
- Molecular mechanisms involved in convergent crop domestication. It’s mutations at orthologous loci, and it can be copied.
- Differential survival and growth of wild and cultivated seedlings of columnar cacti: Consequences of domestication. Gotta wonder if mutations at orthologous loci were involved.
- NAL1 allele from a rice landrace greatly increases yield in modern indica cultivars. But it came from a tropical japonica landrace from Indonesia, and works its magic via pleiotropic effect on plant architecture.