CGIAR’s Generation Challenge Programme is mounting a reasonably effective information blitzkrieg, and chickpeas are the shock troops, with blog posts and videos their weapons of choice. A minor triumph is in the offing on the social networking front. But I have to say I think the RSS feeds are a bit of a rout. The main site has way too many. Yet the blogs over at GCP’s main online product, the otherwise quite impressive Integrated Breeding Platform, don’t have any at all, though the discussion forums (and what exactly is the difference?) do. Time to re-think the whole RSS strategy.
Submissions open for ArcaDeli Award 2012
The Arca-Deli Awards are presented annually (starting 2011) to products and services of locally adapted livestock breeds and cultivated plants. The award is presented to products and services seen as being recommendable as a model or example of good practice. The Arca-Deli Award label can then be used on labelling of products and services as a means of adding value.
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.
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.
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.