- The floating gardens of Bangladesh.
- So, USDA-ARS, what have you done for me lately?
- The story of Ed Toth, the director of New York City’s native plant center on Staten Island. In other news, New York City has a native plant center.
- Not all floods are bad.
- The Consortium discovers FIGS.
- Livestock genetic resources for the poor: The interview. And the PowerPoint. And the Fancy Science.
Getting one’s oats right
Luigi rapidly found me hundreds of accessions in genebanks around the world.
Alas, Luigi was looking for the wrong thing. As Axel Diederichsen succintly explains in a comment to Jeremy’s post of a couple of days back on naked oats.
The name Avena nuda L. refers to the small naked oat, a diploid species, while the naked oat talked about in this article is hexaploid and should rather be called Avena sativa subsp. nudisativa (with quotation of the authorities it will be: Avena sativa L. subsp. nudisativa (Husnot.) Rod. et Sold.). (Reference: Kobylyansky V.D. and Soldatov V.N. 1994. Flora of cultivated plants, vol. 2 part 3, Oat. Kolos, Moscow).
I had searched for Avena nuda, not Avena sativa subsp. nudisativa. Silly me. So it’s back to Genebank Database Hell for me. Needless to say, the subsp. nudisativa is unknown to any of the genebanks I checked, but that’s ok, because the hulless trait is a state in an official characterization descriptor for oats, and GRIN in both the USA and Canada allows a search on characterization descriptor states.
So now I know there are 375 hulless accessions in the US germplasm system and 262 in Canada, in both cases out of over 10,000 Avena sativa accessions. So my original statement turns out to be still true, though rather by luck than judgement. I know what you all want is a map of where those naked hexaploid oats come from, but that’s going to be really, really tricky until Genesys imports the oat characterization data.
More on those parmesan-making Indians
Remember that story I linked to a while back about how Sikh immigrants to northern Italy are keeping alive the art of making parmigiano? Remember how it was in German? Ok, well, now you can read two versions of it in English. But it’s still pretty cool.
Featured: Soybean processing
wew had this to say in reply to a query from Jeremy three years back in connection with a very popular post (41 comments!) on the release of a new soybean variety in Uganda:
In Uganda, soybean is consumed by mixing the flour with millet or maize flour and preparing a porridge from this mixture. This is consumed by children and adults alike as a protein supplement (there are few cheap protein sources in Uganda). This method uses the greatest amount of soybean in Uganda but the most common method of consuming soybean in Uganda is by eating the roasted grain as a snack, often sold by hawkers or street vendors. Small amounts are also consumed as soymilk (locally prepared using a mortar, pestle and strainer) and as paste (mixed with local vegetables).
Now Matt Cognetti wants into the discussion:
I’m part of a Ugandan health team interested in making more efficient grinders to prepare soybeans. Can you please email me back with the method of preparing soybeans, ie. do they use hand mortar and pestle, etc.
We live to make such connections.
AfricaRice’s African rice collection
Nice video. Note the reference, towards the end, to the systematic characterization of AfricaRice‘s collection of 2,500 Oryza glaberrima accessions. Interestingly, Genesys says the Centre has 3,796 accessions. I wonder what’s happened to the rest. Here’s a map of the 863 accessions from 129 sites with georeferences.
LATER: Compare with the map of African rice cultivation in Diana Buja’s post.