You may remember an earlier – somewhat facetious – post on a possible threat to tea diversity in China. Now, from CropBiotech Update, there’s a summary of a far from facetious review paper on tea breeding in that country. Turns out that the China National Germplasm Tea Repositories can count on some 3000 tea germplasm accessions, and that over 200 improved varieties have been released. Some quite advanced biotechnological approaches are being used to speed up breeding. One of the things the researchers are looking at is developing cultivars with low or no caffeine, using RNAi. Personally, I think caffeine-free tea and coffee, like alcohol-free beer, are a bit like a one-legged man at a butt-kicking contest: useless. But the technology is cool.
Bees in trouble
This short piece from EurekAlert describes research in Spain which compared lots of different honeys and showed that the best for antioxidants is that which bees make from honeydew, the exudate produced by plants when they’ve been attacked by sap-sucking bugs. So let’s all go out and eat more honeydew honey, right? Well, we better be quick about it. Unfortunately, according to this other piece coincidentally also published today, life for European bees is set to get considerably more difficult, due to the incursion of Chinese wasps. It is already pretty bad for American bees in 22 states due to something nasty called Colony Collapse Disorder, according to this. Which completes today’s trifecta.
Rice stories
The BBC World Service is broadcasting a series of four programmes on the rice cultures of Asia, called Rice Bowl Tales. Starts 28 February, but if you miss it, it seems like the series has already aired on Radio National, and if you follow the link I’ve just given, you should be able to listen online or download audio files.
More on CWRs
I’ve gone back to my blog a few days back on crop wild relatives and expanded it somewhat. In particular, I’ve added links to several more recent papers on the subject. Should have probably done that in the first place. Sorry.
Starch grains and the origins of agriculture
A couple of papers discussed here and here (among other places: the chili pepper story in particular has been getting a lot of media coverage) describe how the minute, species-characteristic starch grains found in micro-crevices on stone tools and cooking utensils recovered from archaelogical sites are being used to study the domestication of crops as varied as maize, cassava and chilies in the Americas. The findings are pushing back the timing of domestication and suggesting that wet lowland areas were more important in the process than previously thought. Jeremy blogs on the chili angle at greater length here. No word on the past of cactus cultivation, at least in these papers, but this piece suggests its future may be troubled.