- Developing radically-new meanings through the collaboration with radical circles: Slow Food as a platform for envisioning innovative meanings. Companies should collaborate with radicals. Presumably in order to turn them. #resist
- Unraveling agronomic and genetic aspects of runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus L.). At least we know what we don’t know.
- Total leaf crude protein, amino acid composition and elemental content in the USDA-ARS bamboo germplasm collections. If you want to use bamboo as feed, you need to choose among the 100-odd species very carefully.
- The Gene Collection of Autochthonous Wine Grape Varieties at the Institute as a Contribution to the Sustainable Development of Wine Growing and Viticulture in Istria. 3591 seems a hell of a lot, but wow.
- Phage Biodiversity in Artisanal Cheese Wheys Reflects the Complexity of the Fermentation Process. Modern methods kill a lot of phages.
- Setting conservation priorities for Argentina’s pseudocereal crop wild relatives. Go north, young CWR researcher!
- Flowering phenology shifts in response to biodiversity loss. Experimentally decreasing diversity in a California grassland advanced phenology.
- Activity, diversity and function of arbuscular mycorrhizae vary with changes in agricultural management intensity. No-till helps VAM, helps soils.
- Oases in Southern Tunisia: The End or the Renewal of a Clever Human Invention? I’m not hopeful.
- Physiological responses to drought stress in wild relatives of wheat: implications for wheat improvement. 4 species show promise.
- PepperHub, a Pepper Informatics Hub for the chilli pepper research community. Hot off the presses.
- Molecular diversity and phylogenetic analysis of domestic and wild Bactrian camel populations based on the mitochondrial ATP8 and ATP6 genes. The wild species is not the ancestor, and the domesticated species is a geographic mess.
- GenMon-CH: a Web-GIS application for the monitoring of Farm Animal Genetic Resources (FAnGR) in Switzerland. Upload data on your herd or flock, end up with a map of where the breed is most endangered.
- Stealing into the wild: conservation science, plant breeding and the makings of new seed enclosures. Ouch!
- GlobalTreeSearch – the first complete global database of tree species and country distributions. 60,065, about 10% crop wild relatives.
Wild relatives of wheat: one of the four drought stress species, T. urartu, is the AA genome donor to wild emmer (AABB) and hence emmer and T. aestivum (bread wheat AABBDD). Presumably its drought stress is already in the cultivated species. But I’m a bit rusty on wheat genetics.
All of its drought stress resistance?
Luigi: All of the drought stress in the original natural cross, as the entire genome was incorporated. This could have been one cross – like the one that gave us bread wheat, which was a stunner. But it could have been lots of crosses, making wild emmer polyphyletic, as other species. And then there would be a genetic bottleneck between wild emmer and emmer (which probably was polyphyletic). I’ll see if I can find anything on just how many wild species/populations they used at CIMMYT trying to resynthesize bread wheat.
It would probably be better to spend the effort trying for new domesticated species rather than multiple crosses with all available populations of wild relatives of existing crop species (just an opinion). We should be better at domestication now than those early farmers 11,700 years ago (or perhaps not).