- Gene bank of sources of spring wheat resistance to leaf-stem diseases. Crop wild relatives to the rescue.
- Evolutionary History of Wild Barley (Hordeum vulgare subsp. spontaneum) Analyzed Using Multilocus Sequence Data and Paleodistribution Modeling. Recently collected material gives different results to genebank accessions, suggesting geneflow during ex situ maintenance?
- Barley genetic variation: implications for crop improvement. “Contemporary plant breeders now benefit from publicly available user-friendly databases providing genotypic and phenotypic information on large numbers of barley accessions.” Barley Genebank Database Heaven? Should talk to the guys above?
- Detection of genetic integrity of conserved maize (Zea mays L.) germplasm in genebanks using SNP markers. Oh crap, that problem with ex situ barley maintenance is an issue with maize as well.
- Incidence of Seed-Borne Mycoflora in Wheat and Rice Germplasm. Oh, I give up, genebanks are doomed.
- Ethnophytopathology: Rice Fields Free of Diseases, from the Culture of Producers in a Nuquí, Chocó-Colombia´s Community. Careful placement of fields in the landscape ensures they don’t get diseases. Who needs genebanks and breeders?
- Farm production diversity is associated with greater household dietary diversity in Malawi: Findings from nationally representative data. Yeah, but settle down, it’s kinda complicated.
- Landscape fragmentation and pollinator movement within agricultural environments: a modelling framework for exploring foraging and movement ecology. Don’t know how your set-asides and whatnots are going to affect pollinators? Well, now there’s a spatially explicit model for that. Which could perhaps be applied to…
- Complex effects of fragmentation on remnant woodland plant communities of a rapidly urbanizing biodiversity hotspot. Would be so interesting to know if there were any socioconomically useful plants (including crop wild relatives) among these remnants.
- Gender, Seeds and Biodiversity. Whether in Pennsylvania or Peru, it’s women that save seeds. (This is from an old book, which has presumably just been digitized, hence its appearance in my RSS feed.)
- Land Use Dynamics, Climate Change, and Food Security in Vietnam: A Global-to-local Modeling Approach. Agriculture is at risk. Better collect all that germplasm. Right? Right?
- Responses of plants, earthworms, spiders and bees to geographic location, agricultural management and surrounding landscape in European arable fields. Mineral N and pesticides not good for agricultural biodiversity. Too bad you can’t really conserve earthworms ex situ.
- Identification and evaluation of major quality characters of introduced sweet potato germplasm resources. 4 accessions out of 32 from CIP were likely to prove very useful, for different reasons. I’d say that was pretty good.
- Conservation and use of genetic resources of underutilized crops in the Americas – A continental analysis. Some underused crops are more underused than others, but policies don’t help any of them much.
- And this week’s theme, I’ve just realized, somewhat belatedly, is the complementarity of ex situ and in situ conservation. No, really, go back and check. And it was purely by chance too.
Thanks for the big heaping bowl of brainfood this week–it’s like a graduate seminar in a topic that some of us deal with on a daily basis in our current jobs, but didn’t get to study back in grad school…and there’s a new spin on it now with all the sequencing data that are becoming available, including right here in my own “shop”!
Our pleasure, Denise. Would you like to guest-curate a Brainfood one week soon? Maybe with a maize theme? Let us know…