Author: Luigi Guarino

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Going with the genebank workflows

I suspect everyone working in genebanks and other sorts of biorepositories will welcome the new book “Biodiversity Biobanking – a Handbook on Protocols and Practices” by Carolina Corrales and Jonas Astrin.

We compiled extensive information on … workflows from throughout most of the biodiversity and environmental biobanking communities. Publications, grey literature, and Internet sources were reviewed, and proven experts consulted. By linking to protocols and practices from many different types of biobanks we hope to inspire interdisciplinary approaches and interconnect biobankers, and to serve as an aggregated resource for incipient and thematically expanding biobanks. Maybe the compilation of practices can also contribute to processes of method validation and standardisation.

Here’s hoping…

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Brainfood: Human diversity, Wild rye, Caribbean cassava, Three Sisters, Old beer, Old apples, Feral crops, Crop resynthesis

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Dams, damn dams, and accessions

Every once in a while a new dam dataset crops up. Dam, not damn. Well, maybe damn as well. Anyway, when that happens, I feel compelled to mash it up with accession locality data. Because if I don’t do it, who will?

The new dataset is the Global Dam Tracker, and you can download it and everything of course. It’s pretty easy to then upload it to Google Earth and play around with it. Including combining it with data on wild Oryza accessions from Genesys, for example.

On this map, the dams are shown in blue and wild rice accessions in red.

You can zoom in if you’re worried about the long-term in situ future of any given population.

Not for the first time, I wonder about the feasibility of one day automatically and in real time combining data from multiple potential stressors, including dams, to predict the risk of genetic erosion around the world. Something that AI should be able to do, surely?

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Nibbles: Food system transformation, Global food crisis, Rewilding, Genomics, Data management

  1. According to WWF, Solving the Great Food Puzzle involves, inter alia, nutritious indigenous crops, agrobiodiverse cropping systems, and traditional food cultures. Those are just 3 of 20 levers for food system transformation. Is it me or are levers and accelerators the current flavours of the month?
  2. Even the Gates Foundation agrees on that indigenous crop thing, kinda sorta, if you squint. In this piece, for example, Enock Chikava, Interim Director, Agricultural Development, waxes lyrical about teff.
  3. Meanwhile, in the middle of its tomato shortage, and not much interested in teff, the UK is betting on re-establishing prehistoric landscapes full of wild pigs and bison. Bold move.
  4. But who needs bison protein when you have the genome of the faba bean? Which after all is a nutritious indigenous crop, part of agrobiodiverse cropping systems, and a component of traditional food cultures.
  5. Ah, but you need to manage all that data on indigenous crops, and Clemson University is there to help. WWF take note.