- Wild and semi-wild leafy vegetables used by the Maale and Ari ethnic communities in southern Ethiopia. 30 of them.
- Collection and Conservation of Cold Adapted Indigenous Rice Landraces from Western Ghats, South India. 56 of them.
- Exploring Germplasm Diversity to Understand the Domestication Process in Cicer spp. Using SNP and DArT Markers. 3 populations among domesticated types; more diversity in the wilds.
- Genetically-Improved Tilapia Strains in Africa: Potential Benefits and Negative Impacts. Mean present value of introducing an improved strain to Ghana is 1% of GDP, but you could get same with better management. Both would of course be best.
- Diversity in oil content and fatty acid profile in seeds of wild cassava germplasm. Some species could be oil crops.
- The Study of Genetic Diversity and Phylogenetic Evolution in Indigenous Horses (Equus caballus) of Gansu. If I understand the abstract correctly, this suggests, among other things, that some local horse breeds can be traced back to Przewalski’s Horse, maybe.
- Microsatellite Diversity, Population Structure, and Core Collection Formation in Melon Germplasm. In China. Frankly not nearly as interesting as the horse story.
- Optimal sampling of seeds from plant populations for ex-situ conservation of genetic biodiversity, considering realistic population structure. 25–30 individuals per population from few but widely-spaced populations.
- Exploring genetic variation in the tomato (Solanum section Lycopersicon) clade by whole-genome sequencing. 20x more diversity in the wilds than the cultivated, correlated with habitat.
- Understanding Sustainable Diets: A Descriptive Analysis of the Determinants and Processes That Influence Diets and Their Impact on Health, Food Security, and Environmental Sustainability. The determinants of sustainability are agricultural, health, sociocultural, environmental and socioeconomic, and fiddling with one to improve it may screw up another.
- Anchoring durum wheat diversity in the reality of traditional agricultural systems: varieties, seed management, and farmers’ perception in two Moroccan regions. Farmers grow both improved varieties and landraces, the latter mainly for their quality characteristics.
- Unraveling the nexus between water and food security in Latin America and the Caribbean: regional and global implications. Production has increased, but at the cost of the natural capital of the region, and nutritional problems persist.
Focusing on genebanks for climate change adaptation
The Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS) has been the subject of a fair number of posts here in the past couple of years. It has now clearly hit the big time, with a major workshop which got picked up by the BBC, no less. The latest paper to feature this strategy for more effectively mining genebank collections for the material you really want features the search for drought adaptation in faba beans.
Meanwhile, another workshop reminds us that breeding new varieties using the stuff you find in genebanks is just one way of adapting agriculture to climate change:
…there are various agricultural practices to offset the adverse effects of climate change on crop production and soil, such as mulching, that will help with water conservation and soil fertility, and crop rotation, which contributes to sustainable cultivation.
Freeing the banana
By freeing Musa balbisiana of infectious eBSV, virologists are once again friends with #banana breeders says Pierre-Yves Teycheney #IHC2014
— ProMusa (@promusa_banana) August 19, 2014
Well, that sounds teasingly intriguing. Fortunately, we have a mole at the relevant symposium of the International Horticultural Congress in Brisbane. Here’s his brief report from the trenches:
Great talk also by Pierre Yves Teycheney, who together with his colleagues at CIRAD seems to have found a way to deal with the problem of the endogenous Banana Streak Virus that is embedded in the Musa B-genome. Since its discovery this virus had essentially brought to a halt CIRAD’s inter-specific hybrid breeding program, and prevented distribution of any hybrid materials that contained the B-genome. Luckily, an allelic difference was detected that renders the virus non-infectious, so researchers at CIRAD managed to develop B-genome materials (through traditional approaches but also doubled haploids) that are homozygous for the non-infections alleles and ‘voila!’ derived non-infectious material is now again flowing through CIRAD’s interspecific hybrid breeding program!
Keep it coming, people!
Standing up for fruits and veggies
The International Horticulture Congress is up and running in Brisbane, and getting a lot of attention from the Aussie media. ((Unfortunately, I don’t think a fun feature on fruits in the Bible, from Bible History Daily, was in any way linked in.)) There’s a slick video on the global importance of horticulture to help the frenzy along:
Apart from the World Vegetable Center — whose DG came up with the quote of the day: “Things like cucumber and cabbage are essentially just water standing up” — ProMusa is also there in force, and making a splash on social media. That’s because of a special symposium on banana genomics, one of a great lineup of side-workshops. The one we’re particularly looking forward to is the 4th International Symposium on Plant Genetic Resources: Genetic Resources for Climate Change. The hashtag for the whole thing is #IHC2014.
No word on whether the black sapote or medicinal willows, both in the news this week, will feature at any point in Brisbane, but, if they don’t, they have a second chance at the next big global research shindig, the International Union of Forest Research Organization’s (IUFRO) 24th World Congress, from 5 to 11 October 2014 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Its theme will be “Sustaining Forests, Sustaining People: The Role of Research.”
As ever, we welcome reports from such events.
Brainfood: Dryland protected areas, Breeding olives, Tomato cryo, Bacterial diversity, Beta diversity, Old hops, Wild strawberries, Sea bass genome, Forest management, Sorghum biomass
- The role of protected areas in supplying ten critical ecosystem services in drylands: a review. Let the communities take the lead, be inventive about governance.
- Breeding Oil and Table Olives for Mechanical Harvesting in Spain. 19,000 seedlings, 481 preselections in intermediate field trials, 31 advanced selections in a network of field trials, 1 new protected cultivar Sikitita (Chiquitita in USA).
- Phenotypic and molecular characterization of plants regenerated from non-cryopreserved and cryopreserved wild Solanum lycopersicum Mill. seeds. Oops, SSRs pick up some changes.
- Pollen Cryopreservation to Support Maintenance of a Wild Species Collection of the Genus Allium. Variable success. And no word on somaclonal variation.
- Epiphytic bacteria biodiversity in Brazilian Cerrado fruit and their cellulolytic activity potential. No fewer than 29 bacterial genera on 32 native fruits, 30% producing cellulase.
- Fine-scale spatial genetic structure of common and declining bumble bees across an agricultural landscape. Not much structure, due to queen dispersal. Declining species less diverse.
- Genetic Diversity in Remnant Swedish Hop (Humulus lupulus L.) Yards from the 15th to 18th Century. The old varieties are still there, having gone feral in abandoned yards because, unlike for 450 years until 1860, Swedish farmers are, alas, no longer obliged to grow the stuff.
- A comparison of wild and cultivated strawberries for nitrogen uptake and reduction. Some wild accessions might be better at assimilating N.
- Advances in European sea bass genomics and future perspectives. There’s a sequenced genome, but nobody’s using it.
- Genetic effects of forest management practices: Global synthesis and perspectives. There’s no excuse for not doing the right thing now.
- Exploring the variability of a photoperiod-insensitive sorghum genetic panel for stem composition and related traits in temperate environments. You can improve biomass quantity and quality simultaneously. Stem composition variability follows genetic origin.