Luigi Guarino

March 31, 2017July 28, 2017

Genebank opportunity in the UK

The John Innes Centre has an exciting manager vacancy for its Germplasm Resource Unit (GRU). This facility houses materials essential for the injection of new genetic diversity into crop breeding programmes and the identification of genes controlling key traits.

Interested? You can find out more about the genebank on the JIC website. The data in WIEWS is a little bit out of date, but it gives an overview that’s difficult to get from the genebank’s webpage. The overview page on Genesys has more up-to-date information, but it seems only for wheat, barley and pea.

Anyway, I suppose this means that our friend Mike Ambrose, currently the genebank manager, is retiring. We’ll miss you, Mike.

March 27, 2017March 27, 2017

Brainfood: Soil biodiversity maps, VIR wheat, Rice worlds, African maize, Cold rice, Saharan history, Oil palm & CC, GM Cavendish

Assessing soil biodiversity potentials in Europe. The hotspots are the pastures and grasslands of Ireland, Slovenia and Sweden.
Into the vault of the Vavilov wheats: old diversity for new alleles. VIR has diversity that’s not in CIMMYT and Australian cultivars. No word on where ICARDA fits in.
Disembedding grain: Golden Rice, the Green Revolution, and heirloom seeds in the Philippines. There are parallel and competing rice worlds, which differ in how they valorize the local. Or, it could be argued, though not by the authors, demonize the “other.”
Microsatellite DNA marker for molecular characterization of African maize (Zea mays L.) landraces. The Somali material is weird.
Genetic architecture of cold tolerance in rice (Oryza sativa) determined through high resolution genome-wide analysis. 42 QTLs. Is that a lot? It seems like a lot.
Humans as Agents in the Termination of the African Humid Period. Damn livestock. Back to hunting and gathering.
Future climate effects on suitability for growth of oil palms in Malaysia and Indonesia. Well that’s ironic.
Golden bananas in the field: elevated fruit pro-vitamin A from the expression of a single banana transgene. Gene from Fe’i biofortifies Cavendish. Now to do something about taste, texture, general suckiness etc etc.

March 20, 2017March 27, 2017

Brainfood: Silk Road herders, Canadian erosion, Trees & ag, Wheat CWR, Maize adaptation, Stock collections, Tunisian barley, Seed testing, Rosaceae evolution, MRCA, Deforestation

Nomadic ecology shaped the highland geography of Asia’s Silk Roads. Goat Roads doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Agro-biodiversity has increased over a 95 year period at sub-regional and regional scales in southern Quebec, Canada. It’s all in the definition.
Trees for life: The ecosystem service contribution of trees to food production and livelihoods in the tropics. Meta-analysis shows trees and forests are good for crop yields and livelihoods.
Discovery and characterization of two new stem rust resistance genes in Aegilops sharonensis. Chipping away at Ug99.
A study of allelic diversity underlying flowering-time adaptation in maize landraces. That’s a lot of genes.
The challenges faced by living stock collections in the USA. Money, mainly.
Low Genetic Differentiation and Evidence of Gene Flow among Barley Landrace Populations in Tunisia. One big happy family.
Rethinking the approach to viability monitoring in seed genebanks. From germination tests to automated seed storage experiments.
Evolution of Rosaceae Fruit Types Based on Nuclear Phylogeny in the Context of Geological Times and Genome Duplication. A story of whole genome duplications.
Reconstructing the genome of the most recent common ancestor of flowering plants. The mother of all crop wild relatives, before all those duplications, has 23,000 genes and is 214 million years old.
What Drives Deforestation and What Stops It? A Meta-Analysis. Money, and money, respectively.

March 17, 2017

Nibbles: Chocolate & deforestation, Sweet potato breeding, Diversification, Aurochs redux, Flower viewing, Saharan history, CeCaCT

Chocolate makers decide to go green. How about conserving the genetic resources of the crop, though?
“Being a crop breeder in the modern world sometimes feels like being a fire fighter equipped with a very slow truck.”
UNDP supports agricultural diversification.
Reconstructing the aurochs.
We could all do with some hanami. And a hug.
Livestock keeping caused the Sahara?
President of Fiji visits regional genebank. Cue photo of people peering at test tubes.

March 15, 2017

Nibbles: Give a man a chicken, Pollinator selection, Bananapocalypse redux, Red kiwi, ICARDA genebank, Dark comms, Food design, Traditional diets, Revitalizing villages, Peruvian diversity, Moving botany

Which should come first, the chicken or the cash? MIL unavailable for comment.
Pollinators are mini plant breeders.
Save the Cavendish! No, wait…
There’s a red kiwi coming. Eventually. No, not left-wing New Zealanders.
ICARDA decentralizes its genebank. But we knew that.
GFAR webinars on communicating research.
Designing food. What could possibly go wrong?
Decolonize it instead.
Ecotourism in Portugal. No word on whether decolonized food involved.
Kickstarter on documenting food crops in Peru, decolonized or not.
Tracing the colonization and (hopefully) decolonization of economic botany products. Fascinating idea.