- Management increases genetic diversity of honey bees via admixture. No domestication bottleneck there!
- Enhancing innovation in livestock value chains through networks: Lessons from fodder innovation case studies in developing countries. Fodder innovators of the world, organize. If you don’t, you will lose your value chains.
- Introduction to special issue on agricultural biodiversity, ecosystems and environment linkages in Africa. Special issues? What special issue?
- The construction of an alternative quinoa economy: balancing solidarity, household needs, and profit in San Agustín, Bolivia. Despite the allure of fancy denominations of origin and the like, old-fashioned cooperatives, and the much-maligned intermediary, manage to hang on in there.
- Species–genetic diversity correlations in habitat fragmentation can be biased by small sample sizes. Can.
- The original features of rice (Oryza sativa L.) genetic diversity and the importance of within-variety diversity in the highlands of Madagascar build a strong case for in situ conservation. Actually the way I read it, the stronger case is for ex situ. But see what you think.
- Population structure of the primary gene pool of Oryza sativa in Thailand. In situ Strikes Back.
Nibbles: Quinoa, Chilean landraces, Planetary sculptors, Offal, Eels, Grand Challenges in Global Health, ILRI strategy, Artemisia, Monticello, Greek food, Barley, Rain
- The commodisation of quinoa: the good and the bad. Ah, that pesky Law of Unintended Consequences, why can we not just repeal it?
- No doubt there are some varieties of quinoa in Chile’s new catalog of traditional seeds. Yep, there are!
- Well, such a catalog is all well and good, but “[o]ne of the greatest databases ever created is the collection of massively diverse food genomes that have domesticated us around the world. This collection represents generation after generation of open source biohacking by hobbyists, farmers and more recently proprietary biohacking by agronomists and biologists.”
- What’s the genome of a spleen sandwich, I wonder?
- And this “marine snow” food for eels sounds like biohacking to me, in spades.
- But I think this is more what they had in mind. Grand Challenges in Global Health has awarded Explorations Grants, and some of them are in agriculture.
- Wanna help ILRI with its biohacking? Well go on then.
- Digging up ancient Chinese malarial biohacking.
- Digging up Thomas Jefferson’s garden. Remember Pawnee corn? I suppose it’s all organic?
- The Mediterranean diet used to be based on the acorn. Well I’m glad we biohacked away from that.
- How barley copes with extreme day length at high latitudes. Here comes the freaky biohacking science.
- Why working out what is the world’s rainiest place is not as easy as it sounds. But now that we know, surely there’s some biohacking to be done with the crops there?
Glass gem corn goes viral
This image of ‘Glass Gem’ corn has sort of exploded on Milkwood Permaculture’s Facebook page, with over 3,000 “likes” and 10,000 “shares.” I just hope there’s enough seed out there.
Mapping some life
Yes, indeed Map of Life is indeed live, as we Nibbled yesterday, at least for amphibians, birds, reptiles, mammals and fish. 1 MoL pulls in point data from GBIF, of course, but also polygon distribution maps from IUCN, user-uploaded maps, local inventories from various sources and the regional checklists from WWF. That’s a whole load of different sources, formats and types of data to be served up in one googly visualization. Quite impressive. Which does make one wonder why one is reduced to screengrabs to share the results, as for example below for the yak and Dall’s Sheep, two of the high altitude mammals we featured a few days back. No doubt they’ll sort that out.
And we of course also look forward to the inclusion of plants, and in particular crop wild relatives, in the near future. We can point them to some data sources for those…
Featured: Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter
Peterson Wambugu misses the Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter and doesn’t care who knows it:
We are still mourning the death of PGRN. What became of efforts to resurrect it which had been initiated about 2 years ago. The Newsletter was a vital source of information on genetic resources. We really miss it.
So how about it, guys? How are those plans for resurrection going?