Luigi Guarino

March 4, 2013March 4, 2013

Cheap at half the price

…a cost benefit comparison based on the results of this study confirms that the benefits of the GGB, even with the conservative estimation adopted within the current framework, significantly exceeds the costs of its operation. Thus in terms of insurance values generated by the GGB, the flow of annual equivalent values were estimated to represent a minimum of 2.95 million euros whereas operating costs of the GGB currently correspond to less than 3 per cent of this amount on an annual basis. Hence the present study suggests that maintaining and further developing the GGB is an economically justified strategy.

The final report on the “Valuation of the Greek Genebank” (that would be the GBB) project is out. Actually, it may have been out for a while, but I’ve only just now found it. We have blogged about it before. We’ll blog about it again, no doubt, when we’ve digested the results, of which the above quote is the parting shot.

March 4, 2013March 4, 2013

Nibbles: Hunger meet, Collecting info, Mapping species, Fair trade, Irish Famine, Rice changes, Food podcast, Cow genomics

Hidden hunger experts come out into the open.
Bioversity germplasm collecting reports go online.
Where the threatened species are.
Fair trade, shmare trade.
The Lumper makes a comeback.
Rice innovation in Bangladesh, abandonment in Nepal.
Cherfas smears himself in bog butter for new podcast.
Genomics and the livestock industry.

March 4, 2013November 29, 2017

Brainfood: Diverse grasslands, More diverse grasslands, Latitudinal meta-gradients, Acacia barcoding, Cryoconserving recalcitrant seeds, Tree tomato, Modeling parasites, Landscape complexity & services, Genomics & breeding

~~Transgressive overyielding of soil microbial biomass in a grassland plant diversity gradient~~. Dead link. More microbial biomass in mixtures of plants than in each of the monocultures. Which I guess is a good thing?
Ecosystem function enhanced by combining four functional types of plant species in intensively managed grassland mixtures: a 3-year continental-scale field experiment. That transgression goes for the yield of the plants too. The mixtures were also more resistant to weed invasion.
Latitudinal gradients as natural laboratories to infer species’ responses to temperature. Meta-analysis shows that many life history traits vary with latitude, but not necessarily with temperature.
DNA barcoding for conservation, seed banking and ecological restoration of Acacia in the Midwest of Western Australia. Not quite there yet, is it?
Preservation of Recalcitrant Seeds. We have the technology. Recalcitrance is not an excuse. And may not be as common as advertised anyway.
Genetic diversity and relationships in accessions from different cultivar groups and origins in the tree tomato (Solanum betaceum Cav.). It is variable. It originated in Ecuador. Even the press release struggles to say much more than that. They should have asked the mother-in-law.
Metabolic approaches to understanding climate change impacts on seasonal host-macroparasite dynamics. Fortunately, and yet suspiciously, it is easy to estimate the model parameters even when you don’t have much data.
Flow and stability of natural pest control services depend on complexity and crop rotation at the landscape scale. You need complexity in both space and time to get the most out of your landscapes.
Improving fruit and wine: what does genomics have to offer? A lot. But you have to be ready for it.

March 2, 2013March 1, 2013

Cassava accessories in Oxford

The latest In Our Time sent me scurrying to the online database of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. Gotta love a museum whose collection you can search using the keyword “cassava accessory.” I also liked the historic photographs of the Luo, several of which include agricultural biodiversity.

March 1, 2013May 16, 2016

Pisang Seribu in the limelight

You know those websites which do nothing but reproduce photographs of weird and wonderful things, usually as a way of getting you to buy something, often weird but probably not very wonderful? Well, sometimes images get posted from there to Facebook or whatever, and indeed some go viral, no doubt resulting in huge profits for someone or other. The image I saw yesterday didn’t go viral, but it was certainly weird and wonderful enough to do so. It’s of a hugely long bunch of tiny bananas, and you can see it in the original place I saw it, but I’ll reproduce a better photo below.

I was able to find it, ¹ at a blog called Smell the Coffee, thanks to our friends at ProMusa. I posted the original link on their Facebook page, and also on Twitter, and within minutes I heard back with the full monty on our strange banana.

The cultivar is called Pisang Seribu in Malaysia and Indonesia, pisang being the Malay word for banana and seribu meaning a thousand. We have it on good authority that the fruit are ‘delightfully edible’. The other unusual thing about this cultivar, besides the high number of fruit, is that the latter didn’t develop from female flowers but neutral flowers, which usually wither away and do not develop into fruit nor produce pollen. Pisang Seribu doesn’t have a Musapedia page yet, but it is featured on the Cultivar Diversity portal… In Vietnam, it is called Chuoi Tram Nai. Chuoi is the Vietnamese word for banana, Tram means 100, and (I think) Nai means hands.

So maybe now the thing will go viral in the agricultural biodiversity community at least. Thanks to ProMusa.