- 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.
Genebankers to talk genomics
The Plant and Animal Genome XIX Conference, in San Diego on 15-19 January 2011, will have a workshop on Genomics of Genebanks. Any of our readers planning to go?
Biofortified’s take on the biofortification conference
Over at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, Jeremy has been critical of information coming out of the First Global Conference on Biofortification. He wonders if the organizers and attendees were/are too focused on a techno-fix rather than on diverse diets as a solution. This being a conference on biofortification, we talked about biofortification a lot, and it could be argued that biofortification is a techno-fix, whether by breeding or biotechnology.
Ah, but you just know there’s a “however” coming up, don’t you. Thanks to Anastasia for a great summary of the recent biofortification jamboree.
To biotech or not to biotech, that is the question
This house believes that biotechnology and sustainable agriculture are complementary, not contradictory.
That’s the contention being debated at The Economist until 12 November. Why not join in? Apart from being sick to death of the whole topic, I mean.