- 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.
Brainfood: Salinity tolerance, Intensification & sparing, CWR templates, Cacao identity, Soybean CWR, Soybean & CC, Cassava adoption, Indian cauliflower, Bambara groundnut, CC breeding, NUS, Banana access, Enset
- Salt stress under the scalpel – dissecting the genetics of salt tolerance. Could domesticate naturally salt-tolerant species and then breed for agronomic performance.
- Exploring the relationship between agricultural intensification and changes in cropland areas in the US. Higher yields not necessarily associated with less agricultural expansion.
- New tools for crop wild relative conservation planning. Lots of templates.
- Genetic identity and origin of “Piura Porcelana”—a fine-flavored traditional variety of cacao (Theoborma cacao) from the Peruvian Amazon. Similar but not identical to Nacional from Ecuador.
- Cytogenetics and genetic introgression from wild relatives in soybean. Intersubgeneric crossability barrier finally broken.
- Increased temperatures may safeguard the nutritional quality of crops under future elevated CO2 concentrations. Swings and roundabouts.
- Poverty reduction effects of agricultural technology adoption: the case of improved cassava varieties in Nigeria. 1.62 million lifted out of poverty, give or take, depending on the breaks.
- Frequent introgression of European cauliflowers in the present day cultivated Indian cauliflowers and role of Indian genotypes in the evolution of tropical cauliflower. More evidence of interdependence, if any were needed.
- Bambara Groundnut is a Climate-Resilient Crop: How Could a Drought-Tolerant and Nutritious Legume Improve Community Resilience in the Face of Climate Change? Isn’t it obvious?
- Adaption to Climate Change: Climate Adaptive Breeding of Maize, Wheat and Rice. “The good news is that there is significant genetic variation for heat and drought/submergence tolerance in the global maize, wheat and rice gene banks.”
- Crop Diversification Through a Wider Use of Underutilised Crops: A Strategy to Ensure Food and Nutrition Security in the Face of Climate Change. And a good one too. The last three items are from the same edited volume, which looks like should be worth getting: Sustainable Solutions for Food Security.
- Seed degeneration of banana planting materials: strategies for improved farmer access to healthy seed. Decentralize.
- Enset in Ethiopia: a poorly characterized but resilient starch staple. Maybe the above will work for enset too, but it will need better collections.
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: Intensification, Yemen ag, Czech barley, Bangladesh community genebank, Agrobiodiversity Index, North American CWR, Israeli genebanks, Biofortified wheat, QDS, Collecting Miscanthus, Ethnobotany, NUS, Pecan diversity, Korean ponds, CWR gaps double, Salty rice
- Agricultural intensification, dietary diversity, and markets in the global food security narrative. Intensification is all well and good but it needs to be sustainable and nutrition-sensitive.
- Health, Seeds, Diversity and Terraces. Maybe evolutionary plant breeding can help with that.
- Identification of barley powdery mildew resistances in gene bank accessions and the use of gene diversity for verifying seed purity and authenticity. It’s difficult to deal with heterogeneous accessions.
- The USD 1,875.95 Seed Center. A serious-looking community seed bank in Bangladesh.
- Assessing agroecosystem sustainability in Cuba: A new agrobiodiversity index. Not same as the old index.
- North American Crop Wild Relatives, Volume 1. Volume 1?
- Ex-situ conservation strategies for endangered plants in the Israel Gene Bank. Not just crops, and not just conservation…
- The Institute of Evolution Wild Cereal Gene Bank at the University of Haifa. …and not even the only genebank in Israel.
- Assessing Genetic Diversity to Breed Competitive Biofortified Wheat With Enhanced Grain Zn and Fe Concentrations. Four translocations from rye and various Aegilops species have resulted in 8 biofortified bread wheat varieties after a decade of work. Compare and contrast with potatoes.
- Improving efficiency of seed system by appropriating farmer’s rights in India through adoption and implementation of policy of quality declared seed schemes in parallel. FAO’s Quality Declared Seed (QDS) system is the way to go.
- Collecting wild Miscanthus germplasm in Asia for crop improvement and conservation in Europe whilst adhering to the guidelines of the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity. It can be done.
- Making friends in the field: How to become an ethnobotanist – A personal reflection. Yes, it can.
- Mainstreaming Underutilized Indigenous and Traditional Crops into Food Systems: A South African Perspective. Start by having researchers translate their findings for policy makers.
- Genotyping by sequencing (GBS) and SNP marker analysis of diverse accessions of pecan (Carya illinoinensis). Geographic patterning of genetic diversity and SNPs for dichogamy found.
- Trait-based evaluation of plant assemblages in traditional farm ponds in Korea: Ecological and management implications. Dumbeongs are carefully managed. Well there’s a shocker.
- Conservation gap analysis of crop wild relatives in Turkey. There still are some.
- An in situ approach to the conservation of temperate cereal crop wild relatives in the Mediterranean Basin and Asian centre of diversity. 10 locations would do.
- Molecular characterization and identification of new sources of tolerance to submergence and salinity from rice landraces of coastal India. 5 of 98 accessions had novel alleles.
Brainfood: Tibetan barley, Eastern Sahel domestication, CC & coffee, Good bugs, Garden Organic, Amazonian domestication, Maize domestication, Maize & CC, Acidless citrus, Seed commons book, Crispy blueberry, African hunter-gatherers, Indian forages, Brazilian PGR, Cloudberry picking, Wheat & CC
- Origin and evolution of qingke barley in Tibet. Tibetan barley was introduced from the southwest.
- On the Origins and Dissemination of Domesticated Sorghum and Pearl Millet across Africa and into India: a View from the Butana Group of the Far Eastern Sahel. Sorghum and pearl millet got to India from Sudan. No word on whether they ever got to Tibet.
- Was there ever a Neolithic in the Neotropics? Plant familiarisation and biodiversity in the Amazon. Depends on how you define it.
- The earliest maize from San Marcos Tehuacán is a partial domesticate with genomic evidence of inbreeding. The earliest proto-maize was inbred.
- Evaluating Future Impacts of Climate Change on Traditional Mexican Maize Suitability and Indigenous Communities in Mexico. Landraces are going to lose half their area of suitability.
- Why could the coffee crop endure climate change and global warming to a greater extent than previously estimated? Because of carbon dioxide?
- Understanding and exploiting plant beneficial microbes. We’re going to need microbial consortia.
- Genetic analysis of a heritage variety collection. The Heritage Seed Library, in fact.
- Noemi Controls Production of Flavonoid Pigments and Fruit Acidity and Illustrates the Domestication Routes of Modern Citrus Varieties. In citron, limetta, sweet lime, lemon, and sweet orange, acidless phenotypes are associated with large deletions or insertions of retrotransposons in a single gene. Some of them go back a long way, and are associated with ritual use in Jewish culture.
- Introduction: Commoning the seeds: the future of agrobiodiversity and food security. Is there a way out of the current impasse? Maybe.
- Molecular and Genetic Bases of Fruit Firmness Variation in Blueberry—A Review. It’s still unclear whether firmness is a quantitative trait or monogenic.
- Hunter-gatherer genomes reveal diverse demographic trajectories following the rise of farming in East Africa. Hunter-gatherers were more inventive in Africa than in Europe in the face of agricultural expansion.
- Tropical Forage Legumes in India: Status and Scope for Sustaining Livestock Production. >3200 accessions conserved, >50 cultivars released.
- Conservation of crop genetic resources in Brazil in the context of the target 9 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. A lot done, a lot still to do. CWR remain a gap.
- The Impacts of Climate and Social Changes on Cloudberry (Bakeapple) Picking: a Case Study from Southeastern Labrador. Social changes have been more significant, but for how long?
- Global wheat production with 1.5 and 2.0°C above pre‐industrial warming. Frequency of extreme low yields and variability will increase in hot places like India. Assuming no new varieties.