There are links to a whole bunch of interesting stuff on “Why our food choices matter” on bookforum.com today.
A writer on Agave
Waxing poetic about maguey.
Disrespecting the bison
Majestically roaming Plains, bison eat corn.
DNA barcoding takes off
DNA barcoding is based on a gamble (or maybe a shrewd guess), and perhaps a smidgin of circular thinking: that there is a chunk of genome short enough to sequence quickly and cheaply, and which shows just enough variability for the entire sequence to be the same for all members of a species, but different for different species. Well, the gamble seems to have paid off. A suitable bit of a gene has duly been identified for both animals and plants, data are being ammassed, and there’s talk of a portable gadget being available in a few years which will read off the relevant sequence from a bit of leaf or skin or something and compare it with a database to give you the species name right there in the field.
Maintaining diversity: an experiment
When we talk about biodiversity — including agrobiodiversity — we really mean three things at the same time: diversity among ecosystems, among species, and within species. Scientists usually study these scales separately, but can diversity at one level somehow affect diversity at another? That’s the question tackled by an experiment described last week in Science ((MRichard A. Lankau and Sharon Y. Strauss (14 September 2007) Science 317 (5844), 1561. DOI: 10.1126/science.1147455.)) and discussed by one of the authors in Scitizen (fortunately, because the full paper is behind a paywall). ((Thanks to Andy for the headsup.))