Luigi Guarino

July 3, 2012July 2, 2012

Agricultural input requested for bioinformatics whitepaper

We’ve been asked to contribute an agricultural perspective to the Biodiversity Informatics Whitepaper, a document

…that is intended to inform funding organisations about the priorities as perceived by practitioners in the field.

You can find the document itself, and more background, here. Well worth a read, even if you decide not to comment.

July 2, 2012July 2, 2012

Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference 2012…

…is off and running in Copenhagen

The Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC) will convene expertise in the fields of biodiversity informatics, genomics, earth observation, natural history collections, biodiversity research and policy needed to set such collaboration in motion.

Follow it on Twitter. See the presentations.

allowing access to relevant environmental data and predict, anywhere on earth, on any res, at any time, as a service for anyone #gbic2012

— Donat Agosti (@myrmoteras) July 2, 2012

Report on it here, if you like.

LATER: Oh gosh, there’s also this today: 2nd LCIRAH Annual Workshop “The Role of Agricultural and Food Systems Research in Combating Chronic Disease for Development.” Here’s the hashtag.

July 2, 2012July 3, 2012

Brainfood: Brassica breeding, NUS breeding, Soybean domestication, Bambara groundnut, Jatropha chain, Setaria drought tolerance

Developing genetic resources for pre-breeding in Brassica oleracea L.: an overview of the UK perspective. Genebanks will set you free.
Competitive underutilized crops will depend on the state funding of breeding programmes: an opinion on the example of Europe. Divert some subsidies paid directly to farmers to a Europe-wide breeding programme devoted to NUS.
Analysis of average standardized SSR allele size supports domestication of soybean along the Yellow River. The middle part, to be precise, where it loops north.
Bambara nut: A review of utlisation, market potential and crop improvement. Need some functioning value chains, for pity’s sake. That’s why previous promotion efforts failed miserably. Not because they’re, well, not that great a crop? In fact they’re drought-tolerant, tasty, nutritious; but difficult to process, prepare. So do market research to inform breeding.
State-of-the-art of the Jatropha curcas productive chain: From sowing to biodiesel and by-products. Value chains? You want value chains? I’ve got a state-of-the-art one right here.
Validation of an allele-specific marker associated with dehydration stress tolerance in a core set of foxtail millet accessions. The marker explains about 27% of total variation in dehydration tolerance in a core collection, which is apparently pretty good.

June 29, 2012

Featured: The truth about crop mapping

Jawoo Koo has the lowdown on that decision to use the SPAM crop maps for the yield gap atlas rather than, as it turns out, MIRCA2000’s:

The workshop organizer distributed MIRCA’s crop distribution maps to each country expert and asked for feedback on whether the maps adequately represented where the crops are (or aren’t) in terms of harvested area. Reviewing all the feedback comments and comparing the results against the SPAM data, the organizers established that “… In nearly all cases, the SPAM maps were more consistent with the feedback we received from the GYGA agronomists at the workshop.”

There are caveats, though. Read the full story.

June 29, 2012June 29, 2012

Nibbles: C4 rice breeding, Tomato genes, Fruit/nut wild relatives, Peruvian cuisine

C4 rice: it’s really very, very complicated. And Ford Denison on the reason. Kinda.
Speaking of tradeoffs, this tomato taste vs colour story is everywhere. What is it about the (lack of) taste of tomatoes that gets people so riled up? And I wonder what the ones grown in Alaska taste like.
I International Symposium on Wild Relatives of Subtropical and Temperate Fruit and Nut Crops: the abstracts are online. Does it include the tomato. Nope, not getting into that one.
There are several subtropical and temperate fruit involved in Peruvian cuisine. Right? Come on, help me out with these segues.