- If you’re going to grown switchgrass as a biofuel, grow it in variety mixtures.
- The two wild parents of the cultivated peanut get sequenced.
- As also does common bean from its Mesoamerican genepool. Happy International Year of Pulses.
- New wild Aussie tomato gets a cool name. No word on when it will be sequenced. Or how long it will last.
- Speaking of climate change in Australia, wine might be in trouble.
- And more from Down Under: new book on indigenous Australian foods. Some of which may have been cultivated.
- Lots of herbarium specimens have the wrong name. Well I never.
- CIMMYT and ICARDA collaborate on wheat diversity.
- Roman wine rising again from the ashes of Pompeii.
- Exhibition on Colombia’s food plants.
- Portuguese green broth is no doubt very nice, but definitely needs a new name.
- The ancient urban gardens of Istanbul live on.
- Kenya gets on top of using biodiversity for climate change adaptation. Or on top of developing a strategy for doing so, anyway.
- Ola Westengen has a strategy, but you have to speak Norwegian to hear about it.
- Hybrid wheat is 5 years away. How long have they been saying that?
- The latest Rice Today has an article on genebank tourism by Mike Jackson (p. 39), who should know.
- Iowa State University is offering $900 to eat 3 orange bananas.
- Sahaju: saving agricultural biodiversity in India the organic way. Cheaper than $900 too.
- Want to multiply up coconuts really fast? They know how to do it in the Philippines.
Good news from Fiji
While the extent of damage at SPC offices and project sites is yet to be determined, Dr Tukuitonga confirmed the globally-significant tissue culture collections at SPC’s Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees (CePaCT) in Suva are unaffected, as the building is intact and there is a back-up generator maintaining the temperature in the storage laboratories.
Good to know, as Cyclone Winston a week or so back was clearly a bit of a bastard.
And this from the genebank’s curator, Valerie Tuia.
CePaCT facility is all fine – and lucky we have a good backup generator…and the collections are all fine. There was a curfew but staff and us managed to get in to check on the facilities during the cyclone. Only our breadfruit plot is damaged with some varieties decapitated and some fallen over. We would start trimming and allow to regrow. So far getting back slowly and we hope power will back to our homes.
Very best wishes to Valerie, her team and all my other friends at SPC and in Fiji.
Brainfood: Phleum breeding, Rice resources, US corn breeding, Ecuadorian trad foods, Mixed systems, Musaceae history, Berry nutrition, Alaskan cattle
- A Molecular Phylogenetic Framework for Timothy (Phleum pratense L.) Improvement. We have the tools, and the instruction manual, but lack the raw materials.
- Open access resources for genome-wide association mapping in rice. Tools, manual AND raw materials, all on one handy platform.
- Why do US Corn Yields Increase? The Contributions of Genetics, Agronomy, and Policy Instruments. Pioneer “era” hybrids released 2000-2009 were more diverse than landraces cultivated in central Iowa during the late 19th century.
- Barriers to Eating Traditional Foods Vary by Age Group in Ecuador With Biodiversity Loss as a Key Issue. Young people liked traditional foods for their health benefits and good taste; adults for the money they brought in.
- Do Smallholder, Mixed Crop-Livestock Livelihoods Encourage Sustainable Agricultural Practices? A Meta-Analysis. Size doesn’t matter.
- Evolutionary dynamics and biogeography of Musaceae reveal a correlation between the diversification of the banana family and the geological and climatic history of Southeast Asia. We have geology and climate to thank for bananas.
- High variability in flavonoid contents and composition between different North-European currant (Ribes spp.) varieties. Smaller is better in redcurrants, but not in blackcurrants.
- Origins of cattle on Chirikof Island, Alaska, elucidated from genome-wide SNP genotypes. A unique mixture of East Asian and European breeds, plus strong selection.
Vulnerability of crop wild relatives kinda sorta mapped
There’s a nice paper in Nature on how sensitive vegetation around the world is expected to be to climate change. Here’s the money map.
Cries to be mashed up with crop wild relative distributions and gap analysis.
Looking for a good potato picture
Well, Kevin Abosch takes a pretty decent picture of a potato. I’m not sure it’s worth the million dollar price tag, but it’s definitely not bad, as far as I’m concerned. Not everybody agrees, though, and this has spurred an interesting discussion at The Online Photographer, which Jeremy alerted me to.
Mike Johnston, who runs that site, threw out a challenge:
…is a good potato picture a thing that just doesn’t exist?
Commenters point to a number of plausible candidates, including the series by Andrzej Maciejewski, which I like a lot but I agree with Jeremy is spoiled by the lack of variety names.
Any more suggestions?