Brits record waxcaps. World holds its breath.
Mutant teff
Sometimes a crop just doesn’t have the genes for it, as a good friend of mine who dabbled in taro breeding used to say. So then you have to try something else. “Zerihun Tadele is using the latest biotechnological methods to produce dwarf tef lines in order to prevent lodging, which causes significant yield losses.” The technique involved is TILLING (Targeting Induced Local Lesions IN Genomes), an automated methods for inducing, and then detecting, potentially useful point mutations. But is there really no short(ish) teff variety among the 4743 accessions in the genebank of Ethiopia’s Institute of Biodiversity Conservation? By the way, IBC has just won the Sultan Qaboos Environmental Preservation Prize. Congratulations!
Global Compendium of Weeds
Are there really 28,000 weed species?
Cloning equines
Cloned racing mules. Cloned racing mules?
Surf’s up in Solomons
My friend Tony Jansen and his friend Jon put together this fun video on the Solomon Islands. It’s ostensibly about surfing, but there’s stuff in there about agricultural biodiversity too. I met Tony when he was working at Kastom Gaden Association, a great local NGO working on sustainable agriculture and nutrition issues. We worked together on the livelihoods assessment of the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal.