- Phylogenetic analysis in some Hordeum species (Triticeae; Poaceae) based on two single-copy nuclear genes encoding acetyl-CoA carboxylase. Divides up the Africa/Asia and American clades, but not perfectly.
- Journeys through aroma space: a novel approach towards the selection of aroma-enriched strawberry cultivars in breeding programmes. Breed a better smelling strawberry in this way, and the world will beat a path to your door.
- Strategies for engineering C4 photosynthesis. More than one way to skin a cat. But is it worth doing if you don’t eat cats?
- Uses of tree saps in northern and eastern parts of Europe. Not what it used to be.
- Resequencing rice genomes: an emerging new era of rice genomics. Maybe. But it would have been better if they had sequenced something other than Nipponbare originally.
- Toward conservational anthropology: addressing anthropocentric bias in anthropology. “Traditional practices” not always all that great.
- Seed exchange networks for agrobiodiversity conservation. A review. Farmers have to be “well connected” for conservation to work. But nobody really knows what that means.
- Landscape diversity and the resilience of agricultural returns: a portfolio analysis of land-use patterns and economic returns from lowland agriculture. Higher gross margin related positively to greater variance, negatively to diversity, in lowland UK, up to 12000 ha.
- Marker-assisted development and characterization of a set of Triticum aestivum lines carrying different introgressions from the T. timopheevii genome. Getting resistance out of wild relatives and into crops.
- Physical localization of a novel blue-grained gene derived from Thinopyrum bessarabicum. Getting blue pigments out of a wild relative and into wheat.
- Improvement of two traditional Basmati rice varieties for bacterial blight resistance and plant stature through morphological and marker-assisted selection. Getting blight resistance out of an improved variety to improve traditional ones.
- Maintaining or Abandoning African Rice: Lessons for Understanding Processes of Seed Innovation. Farmers play an important role in adopting and developing new varieties shock.
- Dynamic Conservation of Forest Genetic Resources in 33 European Countries. It happens.
- The impact of the Neolithic agricultural transition in Britain: a comparison of pollen-based land-cover and archaeological 14C date-inferred population change. Pollen and archaeology agree on dates, the rest is history.
- Higher levels of multiple ecosystem services are found in forests with more tree species. Swedish production forests, anyway. And more. And more.
PAGxxi tweetstorm of sorts
PAGxxi, billed as “The Largest Ag-Genomics Meeting in the World” is off and running in San Diego, with its full complement of social media bells and whistles. I’m quite enjoying the Twitter feed. Not the official one, mind you, which is pretty boring, but there’s a half a dozen or so people (so far) who are taking the hashtag very seriously. I hope they keep it up.
https://twitter.com/plgepts/status/290626742916378624
EarthStat has crop stats
Those of you last summer who followed a link in a post of ours on crop distribution mapping to
…the dataset of Monfreda et al. (2008), “Farming the planet: 2. Geographic distribution of crop areas, yields, physiological types, and net primary production in the year 2000″…
will have ended up on a file directory containing a whole bunch of crop-specific zip files, from which you could have eventually extracted the modeled distribution of, say, coffee:
Or whatever. Nice, but all a bit fiddly. Well, now there’s a much nicer way of downloading the data in all kinds of useful forms, including Google Earth files. Though you do have to register.
I wonder if ICARDA used these data, or some others, to do their recent work on the impact of climate change on wheat in Central Asia. Difficult to tell from the blurb.
Barcelona Christmas agrobiodiversity products
Yes, we have many solutions
IITA has a pretty nice video out about controlling Banana Xanthomonas Wilt via genetic modification.
Now, don’t jump to any conclusions, I have nothing against genetic modification of banana. In fact, if you’re going to use genetic modification on anything, bananas should be right up there. No chance of that pesky transgene escaping into the wild, for a start. Although I would like to know how they’re planning to engineer resistance into the dozens of varieties that are important in East Africa. Wait, you mean they’re not going to do that? Just a few, eh?
Well, anyway. My main point is that the video gives no hint at all that, as far as BXW control is concerned at any rate, there are other, perfectly viable, options. And IITA knows this, because it has been involved in the development of a pretty effective, multi-faceted, low-cost, integrated, sustainable strategy for control. One that doesn’t involve the threat of reducing the diversity of the crop.
Of course, it would help if there were similarly nice videos about that. There are factsheets galore, true. Lots of factsheets. But videos? Well, maybe you can get them to work. And anyway they don’t really seem to be aimed at the general audience so clearly targeted by IITA’s vid. How can we make the case that there are occasionally more appropriate, sustainable solutions than GMOs when we can’t even win the battle of the videos?