- Kurdistan inaugurates a new genebank in Sulaymaniyah, which Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani calls one of Kurdistan and Iraq’s most important national projects.
- Ghana complements its national collection at Bunso. The new facility further north will improve drying, processing and conservation, while giving northern farmers and breeders closer access to crop diversity.
- Three decades of African bean research partnerships and networking have helped turn a staple crop into a vehicle for improved nutrition, livelihoods and climate resilience.
- In the Philippines, eight promising purple-yam accessions combine yield, sensory quality and market appeal, with Villasis 2 producing up to 60 tonnes per hectare in trials. Does it need a network next?
- However, executive director of Seed Savers Exchange Mike Bollinger’s call in Food Tank’s to carry seed diversity forward extends stewardship beyond formal institutions: Indigenous communities, farmers, gardeners and seed libraries all have a role in keeping crop diversity alive and used.
Crops made, and remade
Two new studies of very different crops – banana and chrysanthemum, of all things – end up telling surprisingly similar, deliciously complicated stories. For these crops, domestication was not once and done, so to speak. They were both repeatedly remade as people moved them through landscapes containing new wild diversity.
In the banana study, the authors suggest that a partly domesticated Musa acuminata lineage from New Guinea was carried westwards through Southeast Asia, encountering and hybridizing again and again with different local wild bananas along the way. Each encounter added new genetic material to an already changing crop, helping produce the genomic mosaics found in mainland Southeast Asian bananas today.
The chrysanthemum study reveals a strikingly parallel history: cultivated plants originating in China were introduced to Japan, where they encountered local wild populations and acquired new genetic diversity, before later movements to Europe and further breeding reshaped the crop again.
The papers also show that an essentially similar process played out somewhat differently in the two crops. In banana, repeated hybridization appears to have been important in the building of the crop itself, as domesticated or partly domesticated plants became the starting material for successive encounters with wild Musa. In chrysanthemum, genomic analysis reveals a more complex network of relationships among multiple wild and cultivated groups, with C. indicum among the important ancestral contributors. In this genetic cauldron, hybridization and introgression repeatedly diversified an established cultivated genepool, contributing to traits such as flower form, colour and plant architecture.
Taken together, these papers challenge the familiar “funnel,” or bottleneck, image of domestication: a one-way downward slide from diverse wild relative to genetically narrow crop. Instead, they point to a more stop-start, two-way, non-linear, geographically contingent process, in which (semi-)cultivated plants continue to encounter, absorb and be reshaped by wild diversity.
In both banana and chrysanthemum — and probably many other cases — wild relatives have been more active, continuous participants in creating the diversity of the crops we know today than we sometimes give them credit for. Or I have given them credit for at any rate.
That argues for treating the wild genepool not simply as a reservoir from which to fish out useful genes one at a time. The historical evidence suggests that crops have benefited in the past from repeatedly absorbing larger chunks of wild genetic diversity, allowing selection to reconstruct useful combinations. Might it be worth trying to make that happen again? Is anyone out there doing pre-breeding explicitly with an eye to the past?
Nibbles: Mango breeding, Cambodian peppers, Cold genes, Geechee cowpea, Navajo genebank
- Blue mangoes.
- Kampot pepper.
- Antarctic flowering plant.
- Sapelo Island red pea.
- Navajo seed data.
Brainfood: Biodiversity works through relationships
- Plant diversity modifies multi-trophic interactions in croplands, grasslands and forests. Increasing plant diversity changes the interactions between plants, herbivores and their natural enemies, but exactly how depends on the ecosystem. Diversification’s pest-suppression magic looks like a farming-specific trick, not a universal law.
- High-resolution carbon and biodiversity mapping shows correlated losses across space and agricultural products. Carbon loss and biodiversity loss from farming turn out to hit the same ground: two-thirds of both concentrated on one-third of agricultural land, with beef and milk alone responsible for 41% of the biodiversity damage. Good news for anyone hoping one policy lever could do double duty.
- Harnessing agri-food system microbiomes for sustainability and human health. Soil to gut, it’s all one network, linking ecosystem function, food production and human health across the entire agri-food system.
- Breeding for beneficial microbial associations. If microbiomes matter that much, why not breed for them? A proposed framework pairs crop traits that recruit good microbes (root exudates, architecture) with soil practices that keep those microbes around, since good genetics on ruined soil gets you nowhere. This means designing crops as participants in ecological networks rather than as isolated organisms.
- Host genetics and social relationships jointly shape fitness-associated microbiome variation in a population of feral horses. Nature’s own microbiome-breeding program: seven years of horse poop from Sable Island shows gut microbes predict winter survival, and related horses share microbes more than chance allows. So the functional unit of adaptation is the animal plus its microbiome.
Nibbles: Amaranth webinar, FARA on fonio, Maslin, Gaza genebank, Nepal seeds, Golden Triangle tea
- New webinar series from the American Society of Plant Biologists will explore how underutilized (or is it opportunity) crops like amaranth can contribute to nutrition, food security and rural livelihoods.
- FARA highlights the tiny West African grain fonio as another crop with potential to improve nutrition, strengthen food systems and create new opportunities for farmers and value chains.
- Taiwanese tea has travelled an unlikely route into northern Thailand. It too was an opportunity crop at one time.
- Ethiopian farmers may have been practising regenerative agriculture for millennia, mixing wheat, barley and other grains in the same field. The Rockefeller Foundation is on it.
- Efforts to restore the Al Qarara Seed Bank in Gaza are offering a small but significant form of agricultural recovery.
- In Nepal, indigenous seeds are losing ground to hybrids, but seed advocates are fighting back.