- The Corylus mandshurica genome provides insights into the evolution of Betulaceae genomes and hazelnut breeding. Yeah, but can it make Nutella better?
- Widely assumed phenotypic associations in Cannabis sativa lack a shared genetic basis. More work needed. Much more work.
- Dissecting industrial fermentations of fine flavour cocoa through metagenomic analysis. There’s a core of microorganisms in common even in very distant farms. Though I suspect the fun will be in the others.
- Widespread lateral gene transfer among grasses. Especially in rhizomatous species. That should relieve the anxiety about genetic modification, right? Right.
- An agroecological vision of perennial agriculture. Wait, what about those rhizomatous perennial grasses, though?
- Comparison of benchtop and handheld near‐infrared spectroscopy devices to determine forage nutritive value. The handheld devices are just fine. How long before Alice asks Chris for some for the ILRI genebank? To test on rhizomatous grasses, of course.
- Historical Indigenous Land-Use Explains Plant Functional Trait Diversity. Forest gardens in the Pacific NW still have more diversity 150 years after their indigenous managers were forced off them.
- The minimum land area requiring conservation attention to safeguard biodiversity. 44% of terrestrial area, home to 1.8 billion people. Presumably including a lot of indigenous managers.
- People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years. 75% of terrestrial area, in fact.
- Protection of honeybees and other pollinators: one global study. Focus on habitat loss and pesticides. And more monitoring.
- A sexual division of labour at the start of agriculture? A multi-proxy comparison through grave good stone tool technological and use-wear analysis. Guess which gender was buried with tools associated with interpersonal violence.
- Origins of house mice in ecological niches created by settled hunter-gatherers in the Levant 15,000 y ago. Well, hence the name, right?
- Commentary: Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future. Don’t warn. Resist.
Brainfood: Lettuce, Little millet, Finger millet, Rice, Maize, Apple, Brassicas, Onions, Grapevine, Tomato, Sheep, Species diversity, Genetic diversity
- Whole-genome resequencing of 445 Lactuca accessions reveals the domestication history of cultivated lettuce. Originally domesticated in the Caucasus, for oil, and then a long, slow wander westward. But so much more to it…
- Variability and trait‐specific accessions for grain yield and nutritional traits in germplasm of little millet (Panicum sumatrense Roth. Ex. Roem. & Schult.). From 200 accessions to 5 both high yielding and rich in Ca.
- Genomic and phenotypic characterization of finger millet indicates a complex diversification history. Wait, East Africa is the least genetically diverse area?
- Portrait of a genus: the genetic diversity of Zea. There has been convergent adaptation in high altitude teosinte and high latitude (temperate) maize.
- Genetic diversity of African wild rice (Oryza longistaminata Chev. et Roehr) at the edge of its distribution. The Ethiopian material is special.
- Candidate genes and signatures of directional selection on fruit quality traits during apple domestication. Fruit colour and taste genes lose diversity during domestication.
- The Evolutionary History of Wild, Domesticated, and Feral Brassica oleracea (Brassicaceae). B. cretica is the closest wild relative.
- Brassica rapa domestication: untangling wild and feral forms and convergence of crop morphotypes. The truly wild stuff comes from the Caucasus, Siberia and … Italy.
- ‘Neodomesticates’ of the Himalayan allium spices (Allium species) in Uttarakhand, India and studies on eco-geography and morphology. Gotta know your onions.
- Multiple independent recombinations led to hermaphroditism in grapevine. The switch from dioecious to hermaphroditic flowers happened two times, but before domestication.
- Revitalization of the Greek Vitis database: a multimedia web-backed genetic database for germplasm management of Vitis resources in Greece. Welcome back!
- Participatory Plant Breeding and the Evolution of Landraces: A Case Study in the Organic Farms of the Collserola Natural Park. From 80 plants of the Mando tomato landrace to over 2000.
- Evidence for early dispersal of domestic sheep into Central Asia. Sheep were being kept in the Ferghana Valley 3000 years earlier than thought.
- A metric for spatially explicit contributions to science-based species targets. Sustainable crop production and forestry in Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico, Madagascar and Brazil would make a hell of a difference.
- Conserving intraspecific variation for nature’s contributions to people. Oh good, I’m glad somebody thought of this.
Brainfood: PES, WTP, Agroforestry, SPA, Urban trees, Plant uses, Fish diversity, Gene editing, Algae, HTP, Cassava breeding, Barcoding, Grasspea genomics, Ancient farmers
- Reducing Hunger with Payments for Environmental Services (PES): Experimental Evidence from Burkina Faso. Paying farmers during the lean season for keeping trees alive results in better diets and livelihoods.
- Payments for Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources in Agriculture: One Size Fits All? No, pay pig prices for pigs and sheep prices for sheep. No word on effects on diets and livelihoods.
- Factors influencing the adoption of agroforestry by smallholder farmer households in Tanzania: Case studies from Morogoro and Dodoma. Mainly access to seeds and land. No word on effects on diets and livelihoods.
- Seed production areas are crucial to conservation outcomes: benefits and risks of an emerging restoration tool. Somebody mention seeds?
- Trees and their seed networks: The social dynamics of urban fruit trees and implications for genetic diversity. Maybe just source your seeds from cities?
- Maximum levels of global phylogenetic diversity efficiently capture plant services for humankind. Species chosen from diverse lineages are more diversely useful than species chosen at random. Now to make sure seeds are available.
- Aquatic biodiversity enhances multiple nutritional benefits to humans. Basically the above, but with fish.
- Improving Nutritional and Functional Quality by Genome Editing of Crops: Status and Perspectives. Or, we could just genetically edit some random species, fish or otherwise.
- Exploring, harnessing and conserving marine genetic resources towards a sustainable seaweed aquaculture. Maybe even seaweeds?
- Picturing the future of food. I wonder if the high-throughput phenotyping described here will work on seaweeds.
- New cassava germplasm for food and nutritional security in Central Africa. 16x greater fresh root yield than the local landrace check wouldn’t need fancy phenotyping to pick up.
- Reliable genomic strategies for species classification of plant genetic resources. This high throughput genotyping and data analysis approach certainly seems to work in picking up misidentified crop wild relatives in genebank collections. No word on seaweeds yet though.
- Grasspea, a critical recruit among neglected and underutilized legumes, for tapping genomic resources. Including its wild relatives, of course.
- An integrative skeletal and paleogenomic analysis of prehistoric stature variation suggests relatively reduced health for early European farmers. Who’d be a farmer, though, eh? But then they didn’t get payments for ecosystem services, nor gene-edited seaweeds.
Brainfood: Allium collecting, IPK barley double, Capsicum crossability, Genetic erosion, Chickpea breeding, Maize phenotyping, Maize landraces, Pre-adaptation, Synthetic peanuts, Genomic offset, Cotton domestication, Public breeding, Wholeness, Smallness trifecta
- Collecting and regenerating populations of the Allium ampeloprasum complex from Greece. There’s some good news, and some bad news.
- Genomic prediction models trained with historical records enable populating the German ex situ genebank bio-digital resource center of barley (Hordeum sp.) with information on resistances to soilborne barley mosaic viruses. Good news if you want to get usable data on genebank accession from old experiments.
- Using Genome-Wide Predictions to Assess the Phenotypic Variation of a Barley (Hordeum sp.) Gene Bank Collection for Important Agronomic Traits and Passport Information. Good news if you thought the above was good news.
- Reproductive compatibility in Capsicum is not necessarily reflected in genetic or phenotypic similarity between species complexes. Bad news for the genepool concept.
- Trends in Varietal Diversity of Main Staple Crops in Asia and Africa and Implications for Sustainable Food Systems. Bad news, especially for Asia, if you like to see diversity on farm.
- Broadening the genetic base of cultivated chickpea following introgression of wild Cicer species-progress, constraints and prospects. Good news if you like to see diversity in chickpea breeding.
- DeepCob: Precise and high-throughput analysis of maize cob geometry using deep learning with an application in genebank phenomics. Great news if you’ve got a whole bunch of maize cobs to measure.
- Demonstration of local adaptation of maize landraces by reciprocal transplantation. Good news if you think landraces are locally adapted.
- Exaptation Traits for Megafaunal Mutualisms as a Factor in Plant Domestication. Good news if you want to learn a new word. Fascinating stuff, all kidding apart.
- Morphological and reproductive characterization of nascent allotetraploids cross-compatible with cultivated peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.). Good news if you like the idea of re-running domestication and there’s no suitable megafauna available.
- Parallel and Intertwining Threads of Domestication in Allopolyploid Cotton. Good news if you’re interested in the domestication, spread, and introgression of the 2 New World cottons.
- Can public universities play a role in fostering seed sovereignty? The good news is the answer is yes.
- Ecosystem integrity is neither real nor valuable. The good news is this may be a straw man. Interesting argument, though.
- Prospects and limitations of genomic offset in conservation management. Good news if you abandon the concept of ecosystem integrity.
- Higher yields and more biodiversity on smaller farms. Good news if you still think small is beautiful.
- Do small food businesses enable small farms to connect to regional food systems? Evidence from 9 European regions. More good news for small farms.
- Global Legal Constraints: How the International System Fails Small-Scale Farmers and Agricultural Biodiversity, Harming Human and Planetary Health, and What to Do About It. Bad news for the agri-food-industrial complex, come the revolution.
Brainfood: Post 2020, Dietary diversity, African greens, Pollinator diversity, Seed science, Seed systems, Sorghum landraces, Wild millet, Maize microbiome, AnGR, Yosemite apples
- Actions on sustainable food production and consumption for the post-2020 global biodiversity framework. Subsidy reform, valuation, food waste reduction, sustainability standards, life cycle assessments, sustainable diets, mainstreaming biodiversity and strengthening governance. Easy, then, I guess.
- Farming System for Nutrition-a pathway to dietary diversity: Evidence from India. Well at least mainstreaming biodiversity is very easy, it seems.
- Unpacking the value of traditional African vegetables for food and nutrition security. Not so fast. African leafy greens have come a long way, but there’s still a bit of mainstreaming to go.
- Wild insect diversity increases inter-annual stability in global crop pollinator communities. Mainstreaming biodiversity should include pollinators.
- First the seed: Genomic advances in seed science for improved crop productivity and food security. Yeah, but it starts with seeds.
- Pluralistic Seed System Development: A Path to Seed Security? Though sometimes the seeds don’t get to who needs them.
- Farmers’ Perception about the Use of Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) Landraces and Their Genetic Erosion in South Wollo Administrative Zone, Ethiopia. Sorghum landraces could do with some mainstreaming. Maybe pluralistic seed systems would help.
- Phenotypic variation and adaptation in morphology and salt spray tolerance in coastal and inland populations of Setaria viridis in central Japan. Mainstreaming diversity in a crop may involve protecting the habitats of its wild relatives.
- Maize germplasm chronosequence shows crop breeding history impacts recruitment of the rhizosphere microbiome. And not in a good way. Looks like mainstreaming biodiversity should also include the root microbiome.
- Farm animal genetic resources and the COVID-19 pandemic. Agroecology is the high road to mainstreaming farm animal biodiversity.
- Genetic data inform Yosemite National Park’s apple orchard management guidelines. Mainstreaming biodiversity in action.