- Anglo-Saxons may not have dropped spelt as quickly as we thought.
- The history of South Africa’s Kristaldruif grape. And where to find it.
- It was colonization that messed up Ghana’s food security. Boris take note.
- The brotherhood of manouls. They can keep it.
- Alpaca farmers out in the cold.
- CIMMYT annual report highlights the genebank.
Nibbles: Fundament edition
- Badass sheep genomes sequenced.
- FAO assesses drylands.
- Sun shines on enkir again.
- Beans good for anemia. Keep you regular too.
- Jacksy‘s the next breadfruit.
- De-extinction is no back door to conservation.
Brainfood: Ghana cassava, Paspalum hybrids, Wild safflower, Genotyping for phenotyping
- Tracking crop varieties using genotyping-by-sequencing markers: a case study using cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz). A third of cassavas found on Ghanaian farms are released varieties, though you’d never know it from just looking at the names.
- Interspecific hybrids between Paspalum plicatulum and P. oteroi: a key tool for forage breeding. P. oteroi is promising, but asexual. But there’s a way around that…
- Phylogenetic position of two endemic Carthamus species in Algeria and their potential as sources of genes for water use efficiency improvement of safflower. They’re actually in a different genus, but could still be useful.
- Genomic Prediction of Gene Bank Wheat Landraces. “…for the two populations of landraces included in this study [Mexican & Iranian], genomic predictions were generally of a magnitude that could be very useful for predicting the value of other accessions in the gene bank and that could be useful in breeding.”
Nibbles: Maize domestication, Seaweed as food, Holy plants, Pre-Columbian Amazon, Pulses, Myanmar rice, Ghana cassava, Chocolate festivities, Tobacco biofuel, Evidence base, Brazilian agrobiodiversity
- Maize domestication video from CONABIO.
- Why has a seaweed never been domesticated?
- Any seaweeds mentioned in the Bible?
- Series of talks on ancient Amazonia.
- Africa needs pulses.
- Myanmar needs salinity tolerant rice.
- 30% of Ghanaian cassavas are improved varieties, but you wouldn’t know it from their names.
- Wait, what, we missed World Chocolate Day?
- Tobacco for airplanes, no warning label required.
- Latest list of conservation interventions that work tackles forests.
- Brazil lists nutritious native species.
One for the birds
There’s a great set of photographs on the Facebook page of Leo Sebastian, Regional Program Leader, Southeast Asia at CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, based in Los Baños, Philippines. It’s entitled Birds in Rice Selection, and the idea behind it is pretty simple:
How about using birds to select for new rice varieties? Observing the birds in the field, they prefer certain varieties to feed on. Such observation can give us a clue of certain grain quality characteristics.
Here’s an example.
Milyang 23 is apparently a popular Korean rice variety. I wonder how they record the results in the database.