- World Bank food snaps.
- Looks like there is phenotypic selection on flowering time.
- Workshop on revitalizing breadfruit in Hawaii. If you go, let us know.
- Sacred Seeds gardens around the world.
- How much do you know about animal production and health? FAO wants to know.
- CIAT now looking at soil biodiversity.
- Boffins can now clone plants as seeds. Clever, but is it good?
Nibbles: Vegetables training, Genebanks and genomics, Kew and CWR, AnGR ABS
- AVRDC’s 30th International Vegetable Training Course Vegetables: From Seed to Table and Beyond.
- Cameron Peace’s excellent presentation on genomics and fruit genebanks at the recent PAG symposium organized by NPGS staff Chris Richards (Ft. Collins) and Clare Coyne (Pullman).
- Kew’s latest Samara newsletter does crop wild relatives.
- Exploring the need for specific measures for access and benefit-sharing of animal genetic resources for food and agriculture. Results of a workshop.
Greening fish and chips
What’s happening to the Great British Fish and Chips Meal? On a recent trip to Whitby on the Yorkshire coast I found that not only is the fish sustainable now.
But the whole thing is also GMO-free.
It didn’t use to be this way. What next? Organic heirloom potatoes? Acid-free paper to eat them from? Hardly bears thinking about.
Nibbles: Australia, China, Turkey, Slovenia, Soybeans, Grapes, Consultation
- Australian breeders discover the joys of participatory breeding — for Oz farmers too.
- Chinese biodiversity symposium a huge success.
- Weird, and weirdly broken, GEF Small Grants Programme reports on a Turkish landrace project. Why here? Why now?
- “Biodiversity: why should we care?” Slovenia’s answers.
- Soybean ability to use iron affects its ability to use nitrogen. Full paper here.
- Missouri grapes to save the world. Show me!
- First ever Regional Consultation for the Strengthening, Conservation and Sustainable Use of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in the Pacific Island Countries kicked off yesterday. Where are our people on the spot?
A brave new world for crop wild relatives
Thanks to Dr Brian Ford-Lloyd of the University of Birminghan in the UK for the following contribution.
A ground breaking publication in Nature Genetics points to the future for the genetic evaluation of crop wild relative germplasm. A group of Chinese scientists have used Illumina Next Generation Resequencing to produce whole genome sequences of 17 wild species of soybean. Only 17 wild species? But this is just the start for evaluating crop wild relatives on a completely different level than before — adding a different perspective to the analysis of genetic diversity, the identification of important adaptive differences between species, and locating novel allelic variation that can be used in crop improvement. One important result from the work is that they uncovered genetic variation in the wild species that has been clearly lost in cultivated material.