- Did Homeric heroes eat a lot of meat? The answer will surprise you. A thread.
- Social food atlas to be launched.
- Atlas of West African food systems already launched. Very different thing.
- Saving chocolate through biotech.
- What makes foods smart?
- Pros and cons of the Lancet/EAT thing. And more.
- Waking up the wine industry to the beauty grapevine wild relatives.
- The magos of maize, from Mexico to the US, and back again.
- Plant breeding training in Africa.
- Pre-colonial North America: not wilderness, not dense forest, and not just the Three Sisters, lots of Apios too. Lots.
- Food AND biodiversity.
- Nutritious OR affordable.
Brainfood: Gene mining, Using genebanks, Wild tomato hybrids, Domestication genes, Intensification, Cicer photoperiod, China ABS, Hybridization, Conservation vs livelihoods, Flax evolution, Clean cassava
- Seeing nature as a ‘universal store of genes’: How biological diversity became ‘genetic resources’, 1890–1940. “Beyond the space-time of Neo-mendelian and Morganian laboratory genetics, genes became understood though a geographical gaze at a planetary scale.”
- Harnessing the potential of germplasm collections. Start with diverse germplasm, then edit in domestication genes.
- Spatial proximity determines post-speciation introgression in Solanum. But said introgression is not that important, in the grand evolutionary scheme of things, at least for these wild tomatoes.
- Understanding Grass Domestication through Maize Mutants. It’s not straightforward, because domestication genes work differently in maize, because of differences in regulation.
- May innovation on plant varieties share agricultural land with nature, or spare land for it? It may do both, under certain conditions. If I understand the economics jargon correctly.
- Photoperiod Response of Annual Wild Cicer Species and Cultivated Chickpea on Phenology, Growth, and Yield Traits. They need 15-18h to flower.
- China’s Legal Issues in the Access and Benefit-sharing of the Genetic Resources. …need addressing urgently.
- Insights from genomes into the evolutionary importance and prevalence of hybridization in nature. It’s everywhere, but whether it’s adaptive is hard to prove. One crop example: common bean.
- Incorporating basic needs to reconcile poverty and ecosystem services. Complicated but workable methodology to identify the win-win solution space.
- Flax latitudinal adaptation at LuTFL1 altered architecture and promoted fiber production. Flax became a fibre crop when it was carried north into Europe as a result of adaptation to higher latitudes, including by introgression from local wild species.
- A method for generating virus-free cassava plants to combat viral disease epidemics in Africa. Chemo- and thermotherapy in tissue culture.
Nibbles: Open data, Banana virus, Potato impact, Peruvian agrobiodiversity, Malagasy Coffea, Evolution experiment, A2S
- “It’s embarrassing if your lab is the only one that isn’t sharing data.” One would hope so, but…
- CRISPR snips out virus from banana genome.
- CIP-related potato varieties are planted on about 1.43 Mha, or 19% of total area.
- Saving Peru’s agricultural biodiversity is more than just about markets.
- I suspect the same is the case for Madagascar’s wild coffees.
- Studying evolution experimentally. Using mice. Plants would have been cooler.
- More on Access to Seeds Index: “Seeds of Nope” seems unnecessarily negative, though.
Brainfood: Sinotato, Photophenomics, Bangladesh lentils, Vernalization gene, Droning on, Pathogen identification, Human domestication, Citrus cryo, Purple rain, Teff diversity, Mining biodiversity lit, Wild dates, Buckwheat improvement, Panicum genome
- Potato and Food Security in China. Huge expansion, mainly due to product diversification, but still room for growth. But how will it end? Like bananas?
- Converging phenomics and genomics to study natural variation in plant photosynthetic efficiency. Chlorophyll fluorescence technologies are revolutionizing phenotyping. Now everyone will want another gadget.
- Is DNA fingerprinting the gold standard for estimation of adoption and impacts of improved lentil varieties? It’s not about yield.
- A florigen paralog is required for short-day vernalization in a pooid grass. Nope, I can’t say it better than the press release: Ancient gene duplication gave grasses multiple ways to wait out winter.
- Drones for Conservation in Protected Areas: Present and Future. Sure, why not. On-farm too?
- Genome-Enhanced Detection and Identification (GEDI) of plant pathogens. Sort of barcoding for bugs.
- Self-domestication in Homo sapiens: Insights from comparative genomics. There’s a domestication syndrome for humans too.
- Cryopreservation of Citrus limon (L.) Burm. F Shoot Tips Using a Droplet-vitrification Method. Well, at least two varieties work.
- Farmers Drive Genetic Diversity of Thai Purple Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Landraces. Well, who else?
- Genetic Diversity of Ethiopian Tef [(Eragrostis tef (Zucc.) Trotter] Released and Selected Farmers’ Varieties along with Two Wild Relatives as Revealed by Microsatellite Markers. The landraces are distinct from the released varieties, and more diverse.
- Biodiversity Observations Miner: A web application to unlock primary biodiversity data from published literature. Nice enough, but you need to upload a PDF corpus. Why not let it loose on the internet?
- Cross-species hybridization and the origin of North African date palms. I always knew that P. theophrasti would come in useful.
- Revisiting the versatile buckwheat: reinvigorating genetic gains through integrated breeding and genomics approach. Start with a database, core collection, and wild relatives. Gratifyingly old-fashioned.
- The genome of broomcorn millet. That would be Panicum miliaceum.
Brainfood: Coca phylogeny, Potato taste & nutrition & resistance, CC & nutrition, Light & nutrition, Remote poverty, Spicy toms, Input subsidies, Broilerocene, European livestock then & now, Bean domestication, Peach domestication, Machine conservation, Habitat fragmentation, Conservation planning, Taxidermy, Wheat diversity, Livestock GS
- Phylogenetic inference in section Archerythroxylum informs taxonomy, biogeography, and the domestication of coca (Erythroxylum species). Morphology is not enough.
- Improving Flavor to Increase Consumption. Yield is not enough.
- The Nutritional Contribution of Potato Varietal Diversity in Andean Food Systems: a Case Study. Yield is not enough.
- Stacking three late blight resistance genes from wild species directly into African highland potato varieties confers complete field resistance to local blight races. One resistance gene is not enough.
- Income growth and climate change effects on global nutrition security to mid-century. Calories will not be enough.
- Urbanization and Child Nutritional Outcomes. Urbanization is enough.
- Socioecologically informed use of remote sensing data to predict rural household poverty. Night light is not enough.
- Capsaicinoids: Pungency beyond Capsicum. Peppers and tomatoes are not enough.
- The impact of agricultural input subsidies on food and nutrition security: a systematic review. The data are not enough.
- The broiler chicken as a signal of a human reconfigured biosphere. The broiler is enough.
- Pre-Roman improvements to agricultural production: Evidence from livestock husbandry in late prehistoric Italy. The Romans were not enough.
- Optimizing ex situ genetic resource collections for European livestock conservation. One genebank is not enough.
- Does the Genomic Landscape of Species Divergence in Phaseolus Beans Coerce Parallel Signatures of Adaptation and Domestication? One genome is enough.
- Genome re-sequencing reveals the evolutionary history of peach fruit edibility. Human selection was not enough.
- Predicting plant conservation priorities on a global scale. This black box is enough.
- Is habitat fragmentation bad for biodiversity? Small patches may be enough.
- Synergies between the key biodiversity area and systematic conservation planning approaches. One conservation approach is not enough.
- Capturing goats: documenting two hundred years of mitochondrial DNA diversity among goat populations from Britain and Ireland. Stuffed goats are enough.
- Decline in climate resilience of European wheat. The current varieties are not enough.
- Harnessing genomic information for livestock improvement. Genomic selection was going to be enough.