The great How Stuff Works website has a whole series of videos on how to make chocolate. If only the World Cacao Federation had got in touch with them!
Genebanks not (yet) trendy
WorldFish has a new blog, focusing on spatial data. It’s only been going a few months, but it looks like it may well have some interesting stuff of relevance to agrobiodiversity. One of its early posts reminded me of something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and that is use Google Trends to look at interest in genebanks. In particular, I wanted to know whether all the news about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has excited people about genebanks in general. Apparently, not.
The various spikes in interest in Svalbard do not seem to have resulted in increasing searches for “genebank” or “seed bank.” At least not that you can yet see clearly. Here’s hoping…
Drastic drought response
Fighting osteoporosis with lettuce
Researchers have apparently engineered lettuce to express higher levels of the sCAX1 gene which pumps calcium into the cell’s vacuole, leading to 25-32% higher levels of the nutrient in the leaves. Sadly, there’s nothing in the article about genetic variation in Ca content among different varieties, so it’s not clear whether these increases could have been achieved by conventional breeding. Anyway, despite the paper, which I nibbled yesterday, showing the possibility of a link between Ca content and bitterness, there was apparently no difference in bitterness between the normal and biofortified lettuces. So that’s allright then.
Bananas on the radio
Voice of America has five (count them!) articles and podcasts on the banana in Africa. Going to take me a while to get through the whole lot, but I’ll try to post a summary when I do.