- Where should we collect sweet potato wild relatives?
- Cheese made from toe bacteria. Because we can.
- The sainted M.S. Swaminathan on millets.
- FAO brings together dietary guidelines from around the world.
- An infographic on kale origins.
- Diversity down, productivity down. At least in Alaska.
- Cotton’s got a genome.
- McDonalds commits to ending deforestation in its supply chain.
- IUCN report says commercial agriculture and forestry could could actually be good for biodiversity. Hope McDonalds read it.
Featured: DOI
Dirk Enneking is only marginally impressed by all this unique identifier stuff:
While the use of unambiguous identifiers to track reference materials is a sensible idea which should be mandatory, the assignment of yet another set of identifiers does not solve the headache that there are a lot of accessions whose origin is obscured due to poor documentation of their itinerary.
What’s needed? I’ll let Dirk tell you.
Nibbles: SDGs, Seed book, Magic millets, Medieval diets, Obsessive botanist, Cocoa melting gene, Double sake, Simcock, CIMMYT double, Popular breeder, Georgian wine odyssey, Cinnamon vid, Yam bean factsheet, Jackfruit bandwagon, Prairie berries
- Agriculture and the SDGs in one nice infographic thingy.
- Seeds: The Book.
- Seeds like millets?
- Those medievals really knew how to eat.
- An obsessive botanist? Whatever next.
- Deconstructing chocolate, one gene at a time.
- Sake 101. And for a more in-depth look…
- Joseph Simcox, self-described “Internationally Renowned World Food Plant Resource Authority” takes you “on a World Adventure to learn about little known edible plants!” On Facebook.
- A journey into the heart of CIMMYT. They’ll even screen your maize for you.
- The people’s breeder.
- Tracing wine to its source: Georgia.
- Harvesting cinnamon. With video goodness.
- FAO unleashes its mighty comms machine on another poor neglected crop: yam bean. Not many people hurt.
- Watch out jackfruit, you’re probably next.
- Or maybe saskatoon berries (Amelanchier alnifolia).
A pioneer passes
Trevor Williams, one of the key early figures in the movement to conserve crop diversity, has passed away at 76. Mike Jackson has done a great job of summarizing Trevor’s pivotal contribution to the field over at his blog. Many have left touching tributes, including a number of people whose careers Trevor was instrumental in getting off the ground. I’m proud to be in that category. Mike is also working on obituaries for the Daily Telegraph, and for Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution, to both of which I’ll be sure to link in due course. The funeral will be held on Wednesday 22 April at 13:30, at St Chad’s Church, Handforth, Cheshire. Trevor’s sister Wendy has asked that a donation be made to the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew in lieu of sending flowers. Further details on Mike’s blog.
DOI see the future of genebank documentation?
Mike Jackson, indefatigable blogger and former manager of the IRRI genebank (among other things), is on a mission.
I’m on the editorial board of Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution. I have proposed to the Editor-in-Chief that any manuscript that does not include the germplasm accession numbers (or provenance of the germplasm used) should be automatically sent back to the authors for revision, and even rejected if this information cannot be provided, whatever the quality of the science! Listing the germplasm accession numbers should become a requirement for publication.
Draconian response? Pedantic even? I don’t think so, since it’s a fundamental germplasm management and use issue.
As regular readers will suspect, we’re totally behind Mike’s pedantically draconian suggestion here. We’ve said much the same thing ourselves on occasion. We’ve even taken it a step further and suggested globally unique identifiers for each genebank accession. Well, not entirely coincidentally, Genesys has just announced a major new feature along these lines:
Genesys database was upgraded to allow for enhanced handling of archived accession data. Accession records in Genesys are assigned a Universally Unique Identifier and are accessible with Persistent Uniform Resource Locators.
A step in the right direction? Over to you, genebank data geeks.