Do you work in a national genebanks? If so, you might want to take a survey on your “molecular characterisation capacity, infrastructure, policy environment, and interest in future DSI collaboration with CGIAR.”
Brainfood: Indigenous edition
- Rapid adaptive increase of amylase gene copy number in Indigenous Andeans. Indigenous Andean populations evolved exceptionally high copy numbers of the AMY1 salivary amylase gene, likely linked to long-term adaptation to starch-rich diets associated with potato domestication roughly 10,000 years ago.
- Horse genetics, archaeology, and the beginning of riding. Horse domestication was not a sudden genetic event beginning around 2200–2100 BCE, but a long and regionally varied process in which Indigenous Eurasian pastoralists progressively managed, rode, milked and selectively bred multiple horse lineages over many centuries, transforming mobility and social organization well before the rise of the dominant modern domestic horse lineage.
- Bridging biodiversity and food systems: A nationwide synthesis of non-conventional food plants (PANCs) in Brazil. Brazil’s non-conventional food plants (PANCs) and associated Indigenous and traditional knowledge could help build more diverse, climate-resilient and socially inclusive food systems while strengthening biodiversity conservation, rural livelihoods and public food programs.
- Indigenous Wisdom for a Changing World: Bridging Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation. Sacred groves and other community-managed landscapes in central Ethiopia conserve high levels of biodiversity through Indigenous institutions, ritual practices and traditional ecological knowledge, suggesting that effective conservation depends on treating cultural stewardship systems as integral to ecological resilience rather than as secondary to scientific management.
- When Knowledge Isn’t Free: Legal and Ethical Imperatives of Protecting Indigenous Intellectual Property. There’s a persistent mismatch between Western intellectual-property regimes and Indigenous concepts of collective ownership, biocultural heritage and intergenerational custodianship of knowledge, and that’s unfair.
- Crediting and citing Indigenous Knowledges within research. Biodiversity conservation becomes more effective when Indigenous scientists and communities participate as equal partners rather than merely as local stakeholders or informants.
Brainfood: Targets, Plant Treaty, Decolonization, Fonio germination, Recalcitrant seeds, Microbiome, Taro seed system
- Status and future of seed conservation of threatened plants in the post-2020 era. 21% of threatened plants are conserved in genebanks across 44 countries in Europe and western Asia. Not bad, but not good enough. I wonder how many of those 21% will be of interest to breeders?
- How the international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture can support effective germplasm exchange: four Colombian case studies. The Plant Treaty can really help a country’s genebanks and breeders drive agricultural development, given half a chance.
- Reconciliation or re-colonization? Critical perspectives on seed banking and colonialism. Indigenous communities need to be careful in collaborating with genebanks and breeders.
- Impacts of climate change on fonio millet: seed germination ecology and suitability modelling of an indigenous West African cereal. Climate change will screw up the germination of fonio in some places, so genebanks and breeders better get cracking.
- Euterpe edulis seed recalcitrance: difficult, yes, but not impossible to genebank. Tricky seed storage behaviour need not deter genebankers.
- Accelerated aging caused diversity and specificity loss in the bacterial communities of Brassica napus seedlings. Genebanks should be careful with their seed aging experiments, because they might screw up the seed microbiome.
- Understanding Biotic Constraints to Taro (Colocasia esculenta) Production in the Derived Savanna and Humid Forest Agroecosystems of Nigeria. Genebanks need seed systems though.
Brainfood: Clonal crops edition
- Ancient DNA reveals 4000 years of grapevine diversity, viticulture and clonal propagation in France. Vegetative propagation of grapevines has been going on since the Iron Age.
- High-throughput olive germplasm classification using morphological phenotyping and machine learning. Olive may be generally vegetatively propagated, but you still have to characterize the fruits.
- Varietal Diversity Analysis of Date Palm and Identification of High Agro-Economic Genotypes in Middle Draa. About half of of the date palms in the middle Draa of Morocco are actually from seed. That makes their diversity difficult to conserve.
- Genebank tools for efficient management of viral infections in tropical clonal crops. All those clonal crops need to be kept clean in genebanks. Here’s how.
- Genome degradation in plant tissue culture. All those clonal crops also need to be kept genetically stable in genebanks, and it can be tricky.
Brainfood: Restoration edition
- Addressing critiques refines global estimates of reforestation potential for climate change mitigation. Better mapping shows there is less land available for reforestation than we thought, and there are limited opportunities for providing multiple benefits. Still, that’s an area the size of Mexico, and worth trying to get it right.
- Genomic approaches to accelerate American chestnut restoration. The American chestnut people seem to be getting it right.
- A native seed bank is restoring land in Canada’s north. Native people — and their genebanks — can help you get it right.
- Controlled Pollination and Reproductive Strategies in Coconut: A Framework for Farmer-Led Breeding, Seednut Production, and In Situ Conservation. Farmers can be helped to get it right.
- Dehulling the secret of the germination of crop wild relatives of Cenchrus, Digitaria, Echinochloa, Setaria and Urochloa. You need information on germination breaking to get it right. In the US Midwest, for example.
- How can Brazilian legislation on native seeds advance based on good practices of restoration in other countries? Not to mention the right policies.