- What I really need today is some Tibetan amdo milk tea. Very parky out.
- Failing that, these cartograms will keep me warm.
- This list of supposedly amazing agriculture maps is only meh, though. Needed more cartograms.
- Oh wait, there are other fermented options out there.
- ICIPE gets into Big Data.
- Toystory has some big data of his own. Worrying perhaps to think what he’s done to the diversity of the breed, but let’s not be churlish about his achievement. At least he wasn’t a Nazi.
- UK welcomes back some bees.
- There was a big UC Davis–Mars Symposium yesterday on “An exploration of scientific discovery, innovation and collaboration in food, agriculture and health.” Some of it was on Twitter.
- Roundup of crop wild relatives etc. research at US Davis.
One wheat database to rule them all
Interesting to see Brockwell Bake, of all people, come up with an online database which
…brings together publicily available data for around 398,000 wheat lines from many wheat germplasm collections including the European Wheat Database, the Vavilov Insitute (Russia), the Australian winter cereals collection, USDA/GRIN (USA), CIMMYT, ICARDA and the Nordic Gene Centre with additional collection site information from FIGS plus pedigree, synonym and genetic data from GRIS and gene symbol and class information from the Catalogue of Gene Symbols to create a central point to help you find wheat lines of interest to you.
In terms of coverage, that’s not far short of what Genesys has, which is 415,070 accessions. Online data does get around…
Cup of cocoa brimmeth over
The International Cocoa Quarantine Centre at the University of Reading has been doing its business of providing disease-free cacao germplasm very quietly and unobtrusively, though no less effectively for that, since it took over from Kew in 1985. Funny, therefore, to see it splashed all over the headlines at the turn of the year. For example, the BBC trumpeted: “Facility opens to safeguard the future of chocolate.” What happened, of course, is that the ICQC just moved into a new, £1 million home at the university:
It consolidates the collection of 400 varieties into a single, improved greenhouse and should make the quarantine process faster, cheaper and greener.
Interestingly, I can find nothing on where the money came from, not even in The Economist, which you would have thought would have looked into it. In any case, great that funds were found to invest in such an important facility in support of cacao research and development. Some think that it would have made better financial sense to have it in a non-cacao producing country a bit closer to where the action is, but there are arguments on both sides.
Anyway, since we’re talking Theobroma, let me take the opportunity of pointing you to the brand new Instagram account of the Cocoa Research Centre at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, which is the source of much of the material at Reading. They’re also on Twitter.
Simran Sethi has been there a lot lately, and also has some cool pix.
Nibbles: American goats, Ancient dogs, Colorado sheep, Beer vs Wine, Vitis breeding, Southern cooking, Pennsylvania farming, Cherokee seeds
- A distinctly US flavour to Nibbles today, for some reason.
- A map of every goat in the US. Texas is the goat hotspot.
- Not there with dogs yet, but at least we now know when they arrived.
- How about sheep, though?
- Interestingly, there are more wineries than breweries in Texas.
- Saving the winegrape, molecule by molecule. Including in Texas?
- Saving Southern cooking, seed by seed. You remember that peanut thing from yesterday?
- But Pennsylvania cooking?
- How about Cherokee cooking?
NENA genebanks get online
Great to see the Regional Plant Genetic Resources Network for the Near East and North Africa get online with such a rich panoply of resources, including a full range of social media outlets. We’ll be keeping an eye on it. In particular, it will be good to see genebank data on the website in due course, perhaps via Genesys.
