- You too can help protect the biodiversity of chickpea, common bean, lentil and lupin in Europe.
- Like this guy did for apple.
- And like the Wayuu are doing with guajiro beans in Colombia.
More good news for wheat breeders from NBPGR
Readers with longish memories may remember a post from 2017 about India’s national genebank’s gargantuan wheat evaluation efforts. Well, if you’re interested in disease-resistant material, powdery mildew can now be added to rust and spot blotch. 52 of the 19,460 accessions tested are predicted to have new PM resistance genes.
Brainfood: Extension, Wheat adoption, Bean ideotypes, Chilli evaluation, Rice domestication, Mungbeans from space, Biodiversity accounting, Cassava futures, Maize haplotypes, Heterosis, Cryo
- Does it matter who advises farmers? Pest management choices with public and private extension. Yes, at least in Switzerland. Public = prevention, private = cure. Well colour me surprised.
- Ethiopia’s transforming wheat landscape: tracking variety use through DNA fingerprinting. Only 28% of farmers correctly named their wheat varieties, many of which were from CGIAR breeding programmes.
- Analysis of the Similarity between in Silico Ideotypes and Phenotypic Profiles to Support Cultivar Recommendation—A Case Study on Phaseolus vulgaris L. Italian farmers not great at keeping track of new varieties either, but who needs names when you have fancy maths?
- Morphological, Sensorial and Chemical Characterization of Chilli Peppers (Capsicum spp.) from the CATIE Genebank. From 192 accessions to this little beauty from Panama.
- Two divergent chloroplast genome sequence clades captured in the domesticated rice gene pool may have significance for rice production. Rice is from Mars, rice is from two Venuses.
- Identification of Mung Bean in a Smallholder Farming Setting of Coastal South Asia Using Manned Aircraft Photography and Sentinel-2 Images. From 10-m imagery for pity’s sake! Amazing stuff. Soon we’ll be able to distinguish landraces from modern varieties, right? Right?
- Linking biodiversity into national economic accounting. Yikes, biodiversity makes no contribution to agricultural development at all?
- High sink strength prevents photosynthetic down-regulation in cassava grown at elevated CO2 concentration. Could result in higher yields, but effect will vary among varieties.
- Discovery of beneficial haplotypes for complex traits in maize landraces. Landrace diversity for early plant development, robustness and growth form that could be useful in Europe made accessible.
- Understanding the classics: the unifying concepts of transgressive segregation, inbreeding depression and heterosis and their central relevance for crop breeding. It’s the dispersion of favorable alleles between parents.
- Challenges and Prospects for the Conservation of Crop Genetic Resources in Field Genebanks, in In Vitro Collections and/or in Liquid Nitrogen. Everything that can be in cryo should be in cryo, and some things that currently can’t too.
The pangenome is the new genome – Part Deux
1) Today's been a hell of a day for plant #pangenomes.
In https://t.co/FSxNthxoG9 Walkowiak et al analyze up to 16 wheat cultivars to report on the global variation pool accessible to modern breeding pic.twitter.com/xPTtIvEZyC— BContrerasMoreira (@BrunoContrerasM) November 25, 2020
Indeed it was “a hell of a day” (somewhat re-ordered compared to the above tweet thread):
- Multiple wheat genomes reveal global variation in modern breeding. Genomes of 10 cultivars from around the world’s breeding programmes and a few other things added to that of Chinese Spring.
- A haplotype-led approach to increase the precision of wheat breeding. The above and fancy maths used to spot novel, agronomically significant haplotypes in landrace collections. Here’s a Twitter thread from one of the authors with his insights on why the work is important.
- The barley pan-genome reveals the hidden legacy of mutation breeding. Genomes of 20 really diverse barley lines, including a wild relative, used to (among other things) find novel variants in 300 genebank accessions.
- Assessing the regulatory potential of transposable elements using chromatin accessibility profiles of maize transposons. Some transposable elements affect gene expression.
- GreenPhylDB v5: a comparative pangenomic database for plant genomes. Pan-pangenomes, kinda.
LATER: Had completely forgotten I had used that title before :) It’s the zeitgeist for sure. And here’s a nice primer on pangenomes.
LATER STILL: Maybe it’s been a good year for something.
…because we're suckers for anything #pangenome!
Also check out stories about:
🍎 Apples https://t.co/O8kIg1HdDz
🌽 Maize https://t.co/xy8z0VQoGA
🌱 Soybeans https://t.co/gfbtD8bSGB
🐦 Birds https://t.co/xy8z0VQoGAhttps://t.co/2Ko0SHHwN0— PacBio (@PacBio) November 30, 2020
Yes, there were lots of pangenomes in 2020:
Nibbles: Climate ready, Commoners, Beer, Banana collecting, Roman food, Indian corn
- Demoing new varieties in Mali.
- Old ways of doing things in the New Forest.
- Nice roundup of beer in ancient history.
- Profile of supercool banana guy Gabriel Sachter-Smith.
- Eat like a Roman.
- Eat like a (multiracial) Southerner.