Solanaceous information
There’s a global online monograph of the genus Solanum called Solanaceae Source. Each species treatment includes illustrations, a clickable list of specimens, links to molecular data and a dot distribution map (which mashes herbarium specimen locality data with Google Maps), among other things. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds the project as part of the Planetary Biodiversity Inventories mission. Collaborators are eligible for small awards in support of their contributions to the completion of the worldwide Solanum monograph.
Wild food plants in Italy
I find it pretty amazing how much — and how many — wild plants are still used for food in many parts of Italy. That includes some pretty unusual things.
Food miles to go before I sleep
A plea to rebuild regional food networks.
Genotyping Support Service
The CGIAR’s Generation Challenge Programme‘s mission is
To use advanced genomics science and plant genetic diversity to overcome complex agricultural bottlenecks that condemn millions of the world’s neediest people to a future of poverty and hunger
They’ve just announced a new service: the Genotyping Support Service. What will GSS do?
Here’s a sample of what our latest service offers: assessing proposals, hiring genotyping services from the best providers, taking care of the administrative hassles, ensuring the generation of high-quality data and training participating researchers to interpret and work with the data to optimise outputs. In this way, researchers get to use the technology right away, while also learning how to get the greatest mileage out of the technology, thus creating local capacity. As such, GSS contributes to GCP’s effort to support and motivate plant breeding ‘champions’ in developing regions.