- NERICA shmerica.
- Did you know that the Society for Advancement of Breeding Research in Asia and Oceania (SABRAO) 12th Congress from 13-16 January 2012 in Chiang Mai, Thailand. No, neither did I.
- Whither wild wheat?
- Koraput and its agrobiodiversity, including aus rice, makes it on the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS).
- GBIF has many duplicates. I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
- Amazonia was densely populated. No it wasn’t. Yes it was. No it wasn’t.
Nibbles: Book, Nutrition, Etrogs, Horse in ancient Israel, Ocean access, Climate change, Mexican smallholders, Fruitpedia, Root crops meeting, Bayer wheat breeding, Old seeds, Viking barley, Cattle rock art, Safe meat & milk
- 1.24 kg of book about Biodiversity in Agriculture.
- Everybody’s already linked to The Economist on The Nutrition Puzzle but we’re not proud.
- And lots of people have linked to the biblical garden story; we’re proud to point out that one of the plants was a culturally important cultivated citrus.
- And while we’re in biblical mood, here’s a culturally important animal to go with that citrus.
- Biopirates plundering the oceans’ genetic resources must be stopped with international agreements, ‘cos that’ll work.
- Big session on Food security, climate change and climate variability at big scientific meeting. Eventually we’ll hear more.
- As when UK Chief Scientist tells Voice of America about agriculture and climate change.
- Small farmers in Mexico are making a difference to agrobiodiversity and politics.
- Fruitipedia! 433 fruits and counting.
- 16th Triennial Symposium of International Society for Tropical Root Crops in the works.
- Bayer CropScience buys into the Texas A&M University wheat genebank?
- Seeds survive in the permafrost. Good news for Svalbard.
- Seeds don’t survive in the permafrost. Bad news for Vikings?
- The connection between the the engravings found on ancient graves and current cattle brands in the same general area. Turkana, that is. Not much is the answer. Pity.
- And how did they make all that meat and milk safe for use, I hear you ask.
Nibbles: Underutilized foods, Overutilised food components, Potato microplants, Maize archaeology, More potatoes, Ag innovation
- Crops for the Future has news of a symposium to promote underutilized food resources in May.
- Or you could go to a report on fibre, an overused resource. I love how they blame the Limeys for all that’s wrong with nutrition.
- Potato Professionals hear the good news about in situ conservation using disease-free microplants.
- The archaeology of maize among the Mississippians.
- The archaeology of Mike Jackson among the Andean roots and tubers.
- Thomson Reuters Foundation has a big package on agricultural innovation. And many more topics you can trust.
Nibbles: Programme evaluation, Slash-and-burn, Goat accents, Share herbaria, ITPGRFA communications, Fish talk, Archaeobrewing
- IFPRI and ILRI put out new free tool on documenting gender and assets data for programme evaluations. Apparently, crop diversity not considered much of an asset.
- The pendulum swings on slash-and-burn? One can hope.
- Different goats sound different. Well there’s a thing.
- Denver Botanic Gardens explains how to share herbarium information. CWRs, take note.
- The ITPGRFA gets itself some RSS feeds.
- And WorldFish a podcast.
- Farming for booze? Start of a series at Scientific American blogs. Can you say “contentious”?
Brainfood: Chicken domestication, Financial crisis and conservation, Cucurbit domestication, Tamarind future, Biofortification via bacteria, Cowpea nutritional composition, Roman bottlegourd, Noug, Rice blast diversity, Pearl millet domestication, Cacao genotyping, Organic ag, Marcela, In situ vs ex situ, Artocarpus roots
- Heritable genome-wide variation of gene expression and promoter methylation between wild and domesticated chickens. Domestication was Lamarckian.
- Global economy interacts with climate change to jeopardize species conservation: the case of the greater flamingo in the Mediterranean and West Africa. Financial crisis leads to closing down of Mediterranean saltpans, which is not good news for flamingo. Climate change doesn’t help. Must be similar examples for plants, Shirley.
- Parallel Evolution Under Domestication and Phenotypic Differentiation of the Cultivated Subspecies of Cucurbita pepo (Cucurbitaceae). C. pepo subsp. pepo and subsp. texana underwent similar genotypic and phenotypic changes during domestication.
- Ecological and human impacts on stand density and distribution of tamarind (Tamarindus indica L.) in Senegal. Climate change will lead to an area of currently low density in the NW being a refugium. Connectivity problems will ensue.
- Biofortification of wheat through inoculation of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria and cyanobacteria. Breeders give up.
- Nutritional ranking of 30 Brazilian genotypes of cowpeas including determination of antioxidant capacity and vitamins. Breeders take heart.
- A short history of Lagenaria siceraria (bottle gourd) in the Roman provinces: morphotypes and archaeogenetics. Out of Asia. And more.
- Functional Properties, Nutritional Value, and Industrial Applications of Niger Oilseeds (Guizotia abyssinica Cass.). It has them, in spades, as this paper summarises.
- Sex at the origin: an Asian population of the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae reproduces sexually. The Himalayan foothills would seem to be the place where to look for resistance.
- Evolutionary History of Pearl Millet (Pennisetum glaucum [L.] R. Br.) and Selection on Flowering Genes since Its Domestication. Bayesian modelling of 20 random genes supports domestication about 4,800 years ago, with protracted introgression from the wild relative, and selection sweeps suggest flowering related genes unsurprisingly underwent strong selection as the crop spread southward. But a single domestication scenario? Anyway, sounds familiar, doesn’it.
- Genome-Wide Analysis of the World’s Sheep Breeds Reveals High Levels of Historic Mixture and Strong Recent Selection. Much like, ahem, pearl millet. For flowering genes, read horniness genes. The bit about an initially broad sampling of diversity sounds a bit like the horse. Who out there is going to synthesize all this domestication stuff? Not that I’m looking for a meta-narrative, mind.
- Ultra-barcoding in cacao (Theobroma spp.; Malvaceae) using whole chloroplast genomes and nuclear ribosomal DNA. Well, sequence the whole thing and be done with it is what I say, why flaff around with ultra-this and super-that?
- The crop yield gap between organic and conventional agriculture. 20%.
- Marcela, a promising medicinal and aromatic plant from Latin America: A review. Achyrocline satureioides, in the Asteraceae. Yeah, I never heard of it either. But these guys say it’ll make you rich and beautiful.
- Comparative genetic structure within single-origin pairs of rice (Oryza sativa L.) landraces from in situ and ex situ conservation programs in Yunnan of China using microsatellite markers. 2-5 times more unique alleles in the in situ version of various landraces compared to the ex situ version, collected in 1980. But same number of common alleles.
- Mutualism breakdown in breadfruit domestication. More recent cultivars have less abundant and less species-rich arbuscular mycorrhizas.