Breeding

February 26, 2016February 29, 2016

Building a prize-winning cassava house

We often say that crop diversity is the foundation of food security, but you have to actually build a house on a foundation, to get the full benefit. So it’s instructive occasionally to consider all the myriad other things that have to go right for crop diversity to have an impact, quite apart from breeding. And it’s great to see recognition for an organization that works on a number of those things: the Queen’s Anniversary Prize was just awarded to the UK’s University of Greenwich for the cassava work of the Natural Resources Institute, which includes everything from pest and disease control to processing and product development. Congratulations!

And if you still want to read something about how to use cassava diversity to provide the foundation for all that cool stuff NRI does, The Economist has you covered.

February 26, 2016

Nibbles: Switchgrass mixtures, Groundnut genomes, Bean genome, New wild tomato, CC Down Under, Aussie foods, Natural history collections, Wheat genebanks, Pompeii vineyards, Colombian exhibition, Portuguese collard, Istanbul bostan, Kenyan adaptation, Norwegian adaptation, Hybrid wheat, GMO bananas, Indian organic, Coconut generator

If you’re going to grown switchgrass as a biofuel, grow it in variety mixtures.
The two wild parents of the cultivated peanut get sequenced.
As also does common bean from its Mesoamerican genepool. Happy International Year of Pulses.
New wild Aussie tomato gets a cool name. No word on when it will be sequenced. Or how long it will last.
Speaking of climate change in Australia, wine might be in trouble.
And more from Down Under: new book on indigenous Australian foods. Some of which may have been cultivated.
Lots of herbarium specimens have the wrong name. Well I never.
CIMMYT and ICARDA collaborate on wheat diversity.
Roman wine rising again from the ashes of Pompeii.
Exhibition on Colombia’s food plants.
Portuguese green broth is no doubt very nice, but definitely needs a new name.
The ancient urban gardens of Istanbul live on.
Kenya gets on top of using biodiversity for climate change adaptation. Or on top of developing a strategy for doing so, anyway.
Ola Westengen has a strategy, but you have to speak Norwegian to hear about it.
Hybrid wheat is 5 years away. How long have they been saying that?
The latest Rice Today has an article on genebank tourism by Mike Jackson (p. 39), who should know.
Iowa State University is offering $900 to eat 3 orange bananas.
Sahaju: saving agricultural biodiversity in India the organic way. Cheaper than $900 too.
Want to multiply up coconuts really fast? They know how to do it in the Philippines.

February 22, 2016February 26, 2016

Brainfood: Phleum breeding, Rice resources, US corn breeding, Ecuadorian trad foods, Mixed systems, Musaceae history, Berry nutrition, Alaskan cattle

A Molecular Phylogenetic Framework for Timothy (Phleum pratense L.) Improvement. We have the tools, and the instruction manual, but lack the raw materials.
Open access resources for genome-wide association mapping in rice. Tools, manual AND raw materials, all on one handy platform.
Why do US Corn Yields Increase? The Contributions of Genetics, Agronomy, and Policy Instruments. Pioneer “era” hybrids released 2000-2009 were more diverse than landraces cultivated in central Iowa during the late 19th century.
Barriers to Eating Traditional Foods Vary by Age Group in Ecuador With Biodiversity Loss as a Key Issue. Young people liked traditional foods for their health benefits and good taste; adults for the money they brought in.
Do Smallholder, Mixed Crop-Livestock Livelihoods Encourage Sustainable Agricultural Practices? A Meta-Analysis. Size doesn’t matter.
Evolutionary dynamics and biogeography of Musaceae reveal a correlation between the diversification of the banana family and the geological and climatic history of Southeast Asia. We have geology and climate to thank for bananas.
High variability in flavonoid contents and composition between different North-European currant (Ribes spp.) varieties. Smaller is better in redcurrants, but not in blackcurrants.
Origins of cattle on Chirikof Island, Alaska, elucidated from genome-wide SNP genotypes. A unique mixture of East Asian and European breeds, plus strong selection.

February 15, 2016February 15, 2016

Brainfood: Species shifts, Rewilding caution, Managing grassland, Natural control, Expansion, Rutin, Citrullus core, Open source seeds, Nagoya consequences, Tree diversity

Altitudinal shifts of the native and introduced flora of California in the context of 20th-century warming. Introduced species are better at spreading upward than the native flora.
Rewilding is the new Pandora’s box in conservation. Step away from the shiny new box.
Threatened herbivorous insects maintained by long-term traditional management practices in semi-natural grasslands. Because they can’t compete with generalists better adapted to the new-fangled conditions.
Agricultural landscape simplification reduces natural pest control: A quantitative synthesis. Aphid control 46% lower in simple landscapes with lots of cultivated land, compared to more diverse landscapes.
Addressing future trade-offs between biodiversity and cropland expansion to improve food security. Expansion could really help with food security, also in importing countries, but is likely to occur in biodiversity hotspots, which means the devil will be in the spatial detail.
Quantitative analysis of rutin content using silkworm genetic resources. Wait, silkworm powder?
Genetic Diversity, Population Structure, and Formation of a Core Collection of 1197 Citrullus Accessions. Microsatellites detect differences between American and E. Asian ecotypes and select diverse subset of 130 accessions from Chinese collection.
Open Source Foodways: Agricultural Commons and Participatory Art. Seeds as art.
Implications of the Nagoya Protocol for Genome Resource Banks Composed of Biomaterials from Rare and Endangered Species. There are many, some of them unforeseen.
Functional Resilience against Climate-Driven Extinctions – Comparing the Functional Diversity of European and North American Tree Floras. Loss of species diversity may be decoupled from loss of functional diversity.

February 14, 2016February 15, 2016

Nibbles: Cover crops, Viet coconut, Water maps, Mao’s mango, Tudor bread, Belgian gardening, IRRI fingerprints, Stay green barley, Miniature donkey

Uncovering cover crops, the NY Times way.
Uncovering coconut cultivation in Vietnam, the Roland Bourdeix way.
Where to expect water shortages, and irrigation. Crying for a mashup.
When a mango is not just a mango.
Bread, and much else, according to the Tudors.
A Belgian plantsman is revolutionizing gardening. No, really.
How genomics will revolutionize rice breeding. No, really.
How to get deeper barley roots for drought tolerance? Look to sorghum.
And today’s miniature livestock is…a donkey.