- Tax qat? Rather you than me, dude.
- ” …non-domesticated animals and plants may give hints on the direction and timing of early human expansion routes.”
- ” The question is why hunger is prevalent when the nature has blessed India with 20 agro-ecological regions and 60 sub-regions to produce the widest variety of food grains, fruits and vegetables in the world?” And it’s a good question.
- “We have sent a report regarding the occurrence of exotic fishes in such a huge quantity to the National Bureau of Fish Genetic Resources (NBFGR), Lucknow.” In other news, India has a National Bureau of Fish Genetic Resources.
- San Diego Zoo works to conserve Africa apes. Fine. But did you know it has a Native Seed Gene Bank?
- Swedes and oats; recipe for cold-tolerant varieties.
- Empowering Farmers to Achieve Food Security. The Head of Food Security at Syngenta International explains how.
Nibbles: Adaptation, Soil bacteria, AnGR, Edible flowers, Potato chips, Ancient beer
- July issue of CSA News, official magazine for members of the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America and Soil Science Society of America, has article on “Crop Adaptation to Climate Change” based on official CSSA position statement, “Crop Adaptation to Climate Change.”
- Factsheet on bacterial diversity and why it’s good for soils.
- FAO guidelines for the In Vivo Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources discussed in Europe.
- Please eat the daisies. Or other flowers.
- Farming chips.
- Never thought I’d get bored of reading about ancient beer.
Rice domestication roundup
In the past few weeks there’s been a number of papers on the genetics of rice domestication. I’ll just give you the main findings here, and leave you to battle with the details on your own. With the help of various other bloggers.
Dorian Fuller did a great job of summarizing the multiple domestication (or indica and japonica) theory at The Archaeobotanist a couple of weeks back. This seems to have the upper hand at the moment. Wild perennial rice is cultivated in wetland margins in the Neolithic Yangtze, and as the water ecology begins to be altered by humans, creating seasonal drought conditions to stimulate seed production, particular adaptations are selected (annuality, short stature, less branching etc.), which leads to the domestication of japonica rice. This is then taken to the area of an independently-domesticated proto-indica, probably around 3800-4000 years ago, and some genes are exchanged. So far, so good, and there is now a pretty comprehensive database of rice archaeology to back up the recent studies of single and multiple genes.
Well, certainly the “genetic and selective basis for domestication” seem to be different for japonica and indica, but another recent paper throws some doubt on the multiple domestication idea. Now, I’ve briefly discussed this with people who know a lot more about rice than I do and it seems the main sticking (as it were) point is the dating of the indica-japonica split to 3,900 years ago. Previous estimate were in the hundreds of thousands of years, supporting the multiple domestication theory, but the problem is that the newer, lower estimate was based on domestication genes only. Lots more argument on the horizon, I suspect.
Nibbles: Cryo, Tree diversity, Agroforestry, Seed industry, Trigonella, Ancient MesoAmerica, Niche models
- CIP’s high-tech genebank.
- “The project’s eventual aim is to plant several thousand trees at sites across Perthshire to act as a ‘living gene bank.'” What, because normally genebanks are dead?
- Millennium Seed Bank joins ICRAF’s BusyTrees thing. Which you can follow in about a million different social networking ways.
- Conservation Magazine does a number on crop improvement. Wait, what? Conservation Magazine? Yep, and with teaching resources.
- Fenugreek, barkeep, and make it a double.
- Ancient chocolate and corn routes.
- What species distribution models do you like?
Nibbles: Seed savers, Lemons, Assam Rice, Striga control, Amaranth, Bearded pigs, Banana, Early nutrition
- Seed savers: everyone’s got an angle, from Seeds of Hope and Change to Seed Bank Bingo.
- Italian lemons enjoying a renaissance. In California, natch.
- India registers Assam farmers’ traditional rice varieties. In other news, rice water “is also used as shampoo, according to community elders”.
- US$9 million to “implement and evaluate four approaches” to controlling Striga in Africa. One day we’ll know.
- Denver Botanic Gardens does amaranth.
- Evolution of bearded pigs. Good to know. Good to eat?
- Bioversity banana team guest blogs at Annals of Botany. But surely they have a blog of their own. No, wait…
- Agriculture is bad for your health.