- Identifying the unique characteristics of the Chinese indigenous pig breeds in the Yangtze River Delta region for precise conservation. Genotyping shows which pig breeds are best.
- Diversity in tree and fruit traits of Strychnos spinosa Lam. along a climatic gradient in Benin: a step towards domestication. Phenotyping shows which fruit populations are best.
- Lactuca georgica, a new wild source of resistance to downy mildew: comparative study to other wild lettuce relatives. Phenotyping shows which lettuce species are best.
- Genetic diversity is enhanced in Wild × Cultivated hybrids of sugarbeet (Beta vulgaris L.) despite multiple selection cycles for cultivated traits. Genotyping shows cultivated x wild sugarbeet hybrids are best.
- Selective sorting of ancestral introgression in maize and teosinte along an elevational cline. Genotyping shows where cultivated x wild maize hybrids do best.
- Genomic analyses provide insights into peach local adaptation and responses to climate change. Genotyping shows which peach genes are best.
- Identification of Novel Sources of Resistance to Ascochyta Blight in a Collection of Wild Cicer Accessions. Genotyping and phenotyping shows which wild chickpea populations are best.
- Comprehensive Metabolite Profiling in Genetic Resources of Garlic (Allium sativum L.) Collected from Different Geographical Regions. Metabotyping shows which geographic regions are best for garlic.
- Fertile Crescent crop progenitors gained a competitive advantage from large seedlings. Seed phenotyping shows which grasses were best for domestication.
- Comparison of long-read methods for sequencing and assembly of a plant genome. Genotyping shows which genotyping is the best.
- A digital catalog of high‐density markers for banana germplasm collections. Genotyping shows which banana genebank accessions are best.
- “The Old Foods Are the New Foods!”: Erosion and Revitalization of Indigenous Food Systems in Northwestern North America. Who needs genotyping and phenotyping anyway?
“Fertile Crescent crop progenitors” paper. This is the wrong paradigm. They consider “role of competition in species mixtures” and “promote the persistence of these species in areas of human settlement, or in early cultivated plots”, that is, in “anthropogenic environments”. This follows Hawkes (1969, “The ecological background of crop domestication”) which is explicit: crop ancestors were ‘ecological weeds’ with large food reserves to resist drying out and which ‘naturally colonized the bare ground and rubbish heaps provided by man.’ No they didn’t.
Our new paradigm is that domestication has nothing to do with anthropogenic environments in the choice of what to domesticate (doi:10.1098/rspb.2018.0277). The large seed of cereal progenitors was an ecological adaptation to counter seasonal natural disturbance: flooding and most probably fire, going back millions of years. Each year, in the nine months between annual growth, the seed was naturally protected by burying mechanisms at depths where seeds needed to be large to reach light. Of course, large seed allowed monodominance as species without seed-burying had been destroyed. (Janzen’s 1974 vision was that large-seeded monodominant tropical trees needed toxic seeds to prevent being eaten: doi: 10.2307/2989823).
With the ability to gather large, palatable seed from natural monodominant vegetation the earliest farmers then increased food supplies by closely mimicking Nature (at great trouble) by the need to plough, harrow, and deep seed, as we still do for our annual cereals (and then added crop introduction as a means of escaping co-evolved biotic constraints). All of which shows that monoculture crops are a reasonably exact copy of Nature and, as the UN Food Summit requires, they form, as closely as could be wished, “nature-positive production systems”.
The many foolish people decrying monocultures have zero understanding of the ecological genius of our earliest farmers.