- Food matters: Dietary shifts increase the feasibility of 1.5°C pathways in line with the Paris Agreement. Go flexitarian.
- Biodiversity footprints of 151 popular dishes from around the world. Go flexitarian?
- Periodic Table of Food Initiative for generating biomolecular knowledge of edible biodiversity. Unclear if flexitarians have the best molecules.
- Environmentally protective diets may come with trade-offs for micronutrient adequacy. More sustainable may mean less nutritious. Flexitarians unavailable for comment.
- Market engagement, crop diversity, dietary diversity, and food security: evidence from small-scale agricultural households in Uganda. Market access and crop diversification are both good for dietary diversity and food security. The ultimate flexitarianism.
- Sustainability of one-time seed distributions: a long-term follow-up of vegetable seed kits in Tanzania. Now watch flexitarians demand an even playing field.
- Developing holistic assessments of food and agricultural systems: A meta‑framework for metrics users. One framework to rule all of the above.
Brainfood: Breeding edition
- Climate-resilient crops: Lessons from xerophytes. Breeding for Na+ exclusion to improve salinity tolerance in crops has compromised their drought tolerance, but both tolerances are down to more gene copies in key families when comparing species.
- Innovation and Technological Mismatch: Experimental Evidence from Improved Crop Seeds. Breeders should strive to give farmers what they want, even if it means releasing multiple locally adapted varieties rather than a single blockbuster.
- Stressors and Resilience within the Cassava Value Chain in Nigeria: Preferred Cassava Variety Traits and Response Strategies of Men and Women to Inform Breeding. Man and women want different things from cassava breeders.
- Intra-household discrete choice experiment for trait preferences: a new method. If only there was a new way to measure that…
- Genome editing to re-domesticate and accelerate use of barley crop wild relatives. No word on whether men and women would edit different genes.
- Understanding Genome Structure Facilitates the Use of Wild Lentil Germplasm for Breeding: A Case Study with Shattering Loci. I suspect neither men nor women would tolerate shattering lentils.
- Repeat turnover meets stable chromosomes: repetitive DNA sequences mark speciation and gene pool boundaries in sugar beet and wild beets. But you can’t use wild species in breeding if you can’t cross them with the crop, and in beet that’s down to the repeatome. So maybe this would make a better case for domestication through gene editing than barley or lentils?
- Development of trait-specific genetic stocks derived from wild Cicer species as novel sources of resistance to important diseases for chickpea improvement. Would be really cool to domesticate one of the really resistant tertiary genepool species.
- Developing Genetic Resources Within the Chenopodium Genus to Advance Quinoa Breeding and the de novo Domestication of C. berlandieri. Not that you need gene editing for domesticating crop wild relatives.
- Genomic traces of Japanese malting barley breeding in two modern high-quality cultivars, ‘Sukai Golden’ and ‘Sachiho Golden’. Old-fashioned breeding has been pretty successful, so who needs CWR, gene editing and discrete choice experiments? ((Last bit added purely for clicks, I’m desperate.))
- Consistent effects of independent domestication events on the plant microbiota. I hope all those gene-editing de novo domesticators are considering the novo microbiomes.
Brainfood: Nutrition edition
- Which crop biodiversity is used by the food industry throughout the world? A first evidence for legume species. Mainly soy, alas. Which is bad because…
- Diversified agriculture leads to diversified diets: panel data evidence from Bangladesh. …promoting diversified farming systems and market participation is good for women’s empowerment and better diets. Which is just as well because…
- Historical shifting in grain mineral density of landmark rice and wheat cultivars released over the past 50 years in India. …breeding hasn’t been good for nutritional content in staples.
- Surviving mutations: how an Indonesian Capsicum frutescens L. cultivar maintains capsaicin biosynthesis despite disruptive mutations. But if you can breed for extreme pungency, you can surely breed for better nutrient content.
- Exploiting Indian landraces to develop biofortified grain sorghum with high protein and minerals. Yep, simple selection can make a sorghum landrace more nutritious.
- Genome-edited foods. Or you could resort to gene editing.
- Adoption and impact of improved amaranth cultivars in Tanzania using DNA fingerprinting. Although maybe it might be easier to just eat more amaranth.
- Stakeholders’ perceptions of and preferences for utilizing fonio (Digitaria exilis) to enrich local diets for food and nutritional security in Nigeria. But documenting knowledge will be key in either case.
- Domestication through clandestine cultivation constrained genetic diversity in magic mushrooms relative to naturalized populations. And watch what you’re doing to diversity.
Nibbles: Fonio beer, ICRISAT seed kits, Dark Emu, China potatoes, 3D genebank, Bioculture, Microbiome genebank, Nutrition, Michigan kiwi
- You can make beer from fonio.
- ICRISAT providing Niger and Chad with sorghum and pearl millet seed kits. Fonio next?
- No, Echinochloa turneriana next. In Australia. I love the Dark Emu Hypothesis, and not least for its name.
- CIP is helping China improve its potato crop.
- Won’t be long before China’s genebank has 3D images of all its holdings. I’d love to see the potatoes.
- Want to see the earliest known site of domestication of teosinte?
- UK builds first crop biome cryobank.
- How the private sector can help with a more nutrition-sensitive agriculture. Should it want to.
- You can grow kiwi in Michigan. Should you want to.
Brainfood: Maize, Chickpea, CWR, Canola, Coconut, Avocado, Eggplant, Carrot, Watermelon, Citrus, Potato, Pearl millet, Roses
- A New Methodological Approach to Detect Microcenters and Regions of Maize Genetic Diversity in Different Areas of Lowland South America. Multiple disciplines identify 4 microcenters of maize diversity in the lowlands of South America.
- Historical Routes for Diversification of Domesticated Chickpea Inferred from Landrace Genomics. Genomics identifies both Indian and Middle Eastern traces in Ethiopian chickpeas.
- Crop wild relatives in Lebanon: mapping the distribution of Poaceae and Fabaceae priority taxa for conservation planning. Spatial analysis identifies a couple of key ex situ and in situ conservation areas for CWR in Lebanon.
- Analysis of gaps in rapeseed (Brassica napus L.) collections in European genebanks. Spatial analysis identifies a few key ex situ and in situ conservation areas for rapeseed wild relatives in Europe.
- Genomic and population characterization of a diversity panel of dwarf and tall coconut accessions from the International Coconut Genebank for Latin America and Caribbean. Characterization of various sorts identifies different Atlantic and Pacific coconut genepools in the Western Hemisphere.
- Pleistocene-dated genomic divergence of avocado trees supports cryptic diversity in the Colombian germplasm. Genomics identifies a uniquely Colombian avocado genepool.
- Analysis of >3400 worldwide eggplant accessions reveals two independent domestication events and multiple migration-diversification routes. Genomics identifies separate Southeast Asia and Indian areas of domestication, and limited exchange between them.
- Population genomics identifies genetic signatures of carrot domestication and improvement and uncovers the origin of high-carotenoid orange carrots. Genomics identifies wester-central Asia as the area of carrot domestication in the Early Middle Ages, and western Europe as the place where the orange variant was selected in the Renaissance.
- A Citrullus genus super-pangenome reveals extensive variations in wild and cultivated watermelons and sheds light on watermelon evolution and domestication. Pangenomics identifies a gene in wild Kordofan melons as promoting the accumulation of sugar in watermelon.
- Pangenome analysis provides insight into the evolution of the orange subfamily and a key gene for citric acid accumulation in citrus fruits. Pangenomics identifies south central China as the primary centre of origin of the genus Citrus.
- Pangenome analyses reveal impact of transposable elements and ploidy on the evolution of potato species. Pangenomics identifies wild species from North and Central America as having lots of genes for abiotic stress response, but also fewer transposable elements.
- Pangenomic analysis identifies structural variation associated with heat tolerance in pearl millet. Pangenomics identifies the key genes and structural variations associated with pearl millet accessions from the most hot and dry places.
- Dark side of the honeymoon: reconstructing the Asian x European rose breeding history through the lens of genomics. Genomics and other data identifies a shift from a European to a mainly Asian genetic background in cultivated roses during the 19th century, leading to a narrowing of genetic diversity.