- Bears shit wild cherry seeds in the woods. But uphill.
- The origins of Swiss cheese. And I mean WAY back.
- The Australian Grains Genebank in the news. Well deserved too.
- Likewise the new Palestinian genebank.
- And the Bourgogne grapevine genebank too, since we’re at it.
- Saving popcorn.
- Jesus’ beer recreated. But would it pass the German purity law?
Another Pacific hibiscus to marvel at
More from our friend Lex Thomson on the Pacific Hibiscus saga:
Excited to report on the finding of a presumed new Hibiscus species in Solomon Islands. This Hibiscus has several distinctive features including round, saucer-shaped leaves with an entire or shallowly crenulated margin and very small, bright red flowers with a windmill arrangement of petals. The serrated dark red eye may indicate a relationship with the Fijian Hibiscus storckii but other features suggest affinities with Indian Ocean islands Hibiscus such as Hibiscus liliiflorus. The new species appears of ancient origins and may represent a ‘missing link’ between Pacific Islands and Mascarene Islands Hibiscus. Am looking forward to working with Solomon Islands botanist Myknee Sirikolo to describe this new species, which is thus far known only from a 1970’s collection from Santa Cruz Islands and the photographed plant in Mrs Bronwyn Lilo’s garden (Gosi Anikisina) near Honiara.
This from the Facebook page of Savurua Botanical Gardens in Fiji.
Lots more work to be done, clearly.
Brainfood: Lupine seeds, Bangladeshi rice, Biscay anchovy, Sweet cassava, Ancient vetches, Salty adzuki, Maroon crops, Mungbean cores, Cassava genome
- Evaluation of thermal, chemical, and mechanical seed scarification methods for 4 Great Basin lupine species. They all need different things.
- Exploring novel genetic sources of salinity tolerance in rice through molecular and physiological characterization. A lot of salt-tolerant Bangladeshi landraces cluster together in an aromatic group close to japonica.
- No loss of genetic diversity in the exploited and recently collapsed population of Bay of Biscay anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus L.). Effective population size has remained steady, irrespective of census population size.
- Molecular characterization of accessions of a rare genetic resource: sugary cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) from Brazilian Amazon. Two distinct genetic groups.
- Presence of vetches (Vicia spp.) in agricultural and wild floras of ancient Europe. One of the proto-IndoEuropean roots for the collective name of these things translates as “avoid”.
- Salt tolerance in wild relatives of adzuki bean, Vigna angularis (Willd.) Ohwi et Ohashi. Two crossable wild relatives had different salt tolerance mechanisms.
- The ‘Botanical Gardens of the Dispossessed’ revisited: richness and significance of Old World crops grown by Suriname Maroons. Some crops are only used in rituals now. But even that’s pretty cool, and better than nothing.
- The AVRDC–The World Vegetable Center mungbean (Vigna radiata) core and mini core collections. 1481 (20% of total) accessions chosen by geography and phenotype, then 289 by SSRs.
- Sequencing wild and cultivated cassava and related species reveals extensive interspecific hybridization and genetic diversity. And you can also use the results for rubber!
Talking non-biotech coffee
I have said before that I would have a priori doubts about anything calling itself Talking Biotech. But I stand by what I also said in that post about the actual podcast of that name, by Dr Kevin Folta of the University of Florida, being largely free — though by no means entirely, alas — of the narrowness, nerdiness and preachyness that the name conjures up, at least for me. And so I congratulate Dr Folta on receiving a few days ago the Borlaug CAST Communications Award, given out annually by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST). The recent episode on coffee, which we have have already Nibbled, is a pretty good introduction to his podcast, if you’re new to it. And I don’t say that just because I’m somewhat involved in the development of the coffee genetic resources conservation strategy mentioned therein.
Conference on eating weeds ramps up
The International Symposium on Biodiversity and Edible Wild Species will be held on 24-27 October 2016 in Antalya, Turkey and will be organized by the General Directorate of Agricultural Research and Policies in collaboration with the Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition Project (GEF/UNEP/FAO) and BFN Turkey.
All abstracts must be sent in no later than 31 July 2016, so get cracking.