Brainfood: Barley diversity, Chinese veggies, Perennial legumes, Ecosystem value, Wild restorer, Eggplant taxonomy, Sweet potato phenotyping, Grass pollen, Aromatic rice origin, Orange cucumber, Watermelon breeding, Livestock value, Wild apples

Genome-Wide Association Mapping of Seedling Net Form Net Blotch Resistance in an Ethiopian and Eritrean Barley Collection. 8 new QTLs, just like that.
Vegetable Genetic Resources in China. 36,000 accessions. Just like that.
Building a botanical foundation for perennial agriculture: Global inventory of wild, perennial herbaceous Fabaceae species. Check out the Perennial Agriculture Project Global Inventory.
Ecosystem services and nature’s contribution to people: negotiating diverse values and trade-offs in land systems. Biological diversity has a diversity of values. Duh.
Development of a drought stress-resistant rice restorer line through Oryza sativa–rufipogon hybridization. From F6 via BC5F5 to BIL627.
Eggplants and Relatives: From Exploring Their Diversity and Phylogenetic Relationships to Conservation Challenges. The taxonomy is “arduous and unstable.”
Morphometric and colourimetric tools to dissect morphological diversity: an application in sweet potato [Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.]. Beyond colour charts. Way beyond.
Chemotaxonomy of domesticated grasses: a pathway to understanding the origins of agriculture. Fancy maths can identify pollen grains.
Origin of the Aromatic Group of Cultivated Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Traced to the Indian Subcontinent. Arose when japonica hybridized with local wild populations.
Orange-fleshed cucumber (Cucumis sativus var. sativus L.) germplasm from North-East India: agro-morphological, biochemical and evolutionary studies. Possible niche market?
Progress in genetic improvement of citron watermelon (Citrullus lanatus var. citroides): a review. These are all orange-fleshed.
Review: Domestic herbivores and food security: current contribution, trends and challenges for a sustainable development. Can’t live without them, but gotta do something about that enteric fermentation.
Evaluation of Malus genetic resources for tolerance to apple replant disease (ARD). It’s the wilds, of course.

Fresh Nibbles

A paean to diverse diets is just what we all need.
And another one, from the MIT Technology Review of all places.
Menawhile, there’s only one reference to dietary diversity in the World Bank’s investment framework for nutrition.
Maybe you have to quantify that diversity before you can save it? Now where have I heard that before?
Meanwhile, Europe reports on biodiversity-friendly farming practices. Does that include the biodiversity of the actual crops? Perhaps surprisingly, yes!
You want biodiversity-friendly farming practices? Talk to Indigenous people. The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has launched an e-consultation on “Preserving, strengthening and promoting Indigenous Peoples’ food and knowledge systems and traditional practices for sustainable food systems.”
There’s diversity in asparagus too.
Genebanks can help with those biodiversity-friendly practices, diverse diets and rops and Indigenous practices.
Even big international genebanks.
Even the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
But some are in trouble.
Though others are coming back.

Published on November 7, 2024

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