- Evolutionary and food supply implications of ongoing maize domestication by Mexican campesinos. Effective population of 500 million plants potentially feeds 50 million people.
- Modulating plant growth–metabolism coordination for sustainable agriculture. Short AND sweet.
- Cracking the Code of Biodiversity Responses to Past Climate Change. Quite a bit of adaptation, not just migration and extinction.
- Plant-Parasitic Nematodes and Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa. The greatest biotic threat to productivity on the continent, and probably going to get worse.
- Efficient curation of genebanks using next-generation sequencing reveals substantial duplication of germplasm accessions. Out of 1143 accessions of a wild wheat in 3 collections, 564 are unique.
- Emerging plant disease epidemics: Biological research is key but not enough. Not just about the money.
Maize in Mexico: This is an odd paper. It claims: `… it is likely that different alleles are being favoured by different selection pressures’. That is, it supposes `ongoing maize domestication’ but provides no actual measure of it. It also says: `… evolution under domestication continues to occur in other crops in other countries…’ but gives no references to support this. The fact that campesino varieties are being lost – that is what genetic erosion is all about – seems to suggest that `ongoing domestication’ is not happening fast enough, that is, we have backwards evolution on farm, with local variation and selection pressure not being enough to maintain varieties over the longer term. In contrast, institutional plant breeding does have enough variation (from genebanks) and can exert enough selection pressure (through screening) to surpass in a measurable way the efforts of farmers.