- The latest on the Pristine Myth of the Amazon. And how to protect it.
- Rice going nuclear in Bangladesh.
- NYC gets a chocolate museum.
- What is biodiversity? Answers on a postcard, please…
- Maybe robots can help with that.
- Crops for the Future gets the Virginia Gewin treatment.
- Sheep domestication in half a page.
Sweet day
On this fine day, meet Dr Janaki Ammal…
By manipulating polyploid cells through cross-breeding of hybrids in the laboratory, Janaki was able to create a high yielding strain of the sugarcane that would thrive in Indian conditions. Her research also helped analyse the geographical distribution of sugarcane across India, and to establish that the S. Spontaneum variety of sugarcane had originated in India.
…India’s first woman PhD in botany, and a pioneer in the use of wild relatives in sugarcane breeding.
An incredible woman who spent her life in the pursuit of science, Janaki Ammal believed that it was through her work that she should be remembered. So, the next time you use a spoonful of sugar grown by an Indian sugarcane farmer, remember that you are it was Dr Janaki Ammal who added that extra bit of sweetness!
Brainfood: Arabidopsis refugia, Potato diversity, Palm uses, Coffee phylogeny, Traditional harvesting, Buckwheat trends, Maize double haploids, African cattle, Endophenotype
- On the post-glacial spread of human commensal Arabidopsis thaliana. A bit like Neanderthals.
- Exploration of the genetic diversity of cultivated potato and its wild progenitors (Solanum sect. Petota) with insights into potato domestication and genome evolution. Elite cultivars are a pretty diverse lot.
- Fundamental species traits explain provisioning services of tropical American palms. Bigger, more widespread species are more important to local people. Which means some useful things may be being missed.
- Genotyping-by-sequencing provides the first well-resolved phylogeny for coffee (Coffea) and insights into the evolution of caffeine content in its species: GBS coffee phylogeny and the evolution of caffeine content. Origin of the genus could be Africa. Or Asia. Or the Arabian Peninsula. So that narrows it down.
- A quiet harvest: linkage between ritual, seed selection and the historical use of the finger-bladed knife as a traditional plant breeding tool in Ifugao, Philippines. People kept old harvesting technology because it helped them show due reverence to the rice plant, and select seeds.
- Old Crop, New Society: Persistence and Change of Tartary Buckwheat Farming in Yunnan, China. It’s going down, but won’t disappear. No word on what’s happening to diversity though.
- Tapping the genetic diversity of landraces in allogamous crops with doubled haploid lines: a case study from European flint maize. The things people have to do to make use of landraces.
- Conservation of indigenous cattle genetic resources in Southern Africa’s smallholder areas: turning threats into opportunities — A review. We now the breeds, but not all their characteristics, and how to get the most out of them.
- The Importance of Endophenotypes to Evaluate the Relationship between Genotype and External Phenotype. Oh for pity’s sake, something else to worry about.
Nibbles: Meet a breeder, Radiation breeding, Cassava IK, Banana apocalypse, Chestnut doom & gloom, Crazy grafter, Crazy recombination, Obsidian sickle, Cat rug
- Meet a pumpkin breeder.
- Meet the history of atomic plant breeding.
- Meet a cassava anthropologist.
- Dial back the banana apocalypse stuff, banana guy says.
- On the other hand, the American chestnut apocalypse is all too real.
- A really wild pig.
- Grafting gone wild.
- Wild plants reveal a gene to speed plant breeding, someday.
- Beautiful Neolithic tools from the Sea of Galilee.
- And a beautiful, but slightly freaky, Egyptian rug. Made of cat hair.
Brainfood: Potato changes, Anti-carcinogenic kava, Horizontal barley, Genebank use, Lotus diversity, Rubber soul, CWR breeding, Andean PGR, Distribution modelling
- Genetic diversity of Bolivian wild potato germplasm: changes during ex situ conservation management and comparisons with resampled in situ populations. It’s all a bit of a lottery.
- Traditional preparations of kava (Piper methysticum) inhibit the growth of human colon cancer cells in vitro. Still tastes like crap, though.
- Multiple horizontal transfers of nuclear ribosomal genes between phylogenetically distinct grass lineages. 9 independent instances of non-sexual panicoid introgression into wild barley species.
- Who is sowing our seeds? A systematic review of the use of plant genetic resources in research. Ahem, researchers? Study of the UK Vegetable Genebank.
- Evaluation of Lotus corniculatus L. accessions from different locations at different altitudes reveals phenotypic and genetic diversity. Phenotype could be the same, and genotype still be different.
- De novo hybrid assembly of the rubber tree genome reveals evidence of paleotetraploidy in Hevea species. Which happened before Hevea and Manihot diverged.
- Potential Uses of Wild Germplasms of Grain Legumes for Crop Improvement. “A big international effort is underway with the aim to adapt agriculture to climate change, which includes collecting, protecting and preparing crop wild relatives. Several pulses are among the major targets: common bean, adzuki bean, chickpea, cowpea, faba bean, groundnut, lentil, lima bean, mung bean, pea, pigeonpea, soybean, urd bean and vetch [197,198]. The information generated and systematized from this project certainly will be a unique source of information and materials facing the current and futures challenges for agriculture in the context of crop wild relatives use.” How sweet.
- Assessing the Benefits of Andean Crop Diversity on Farmers’ Livelihood: Insights from a Development Programme in Bolivia and Peru. Private benefits can incentivize public ones.
- Modelling of species distributions, range dynamics and communities under imperfect detection: advances, challenges and opportunities. Beyond mere presence.