Breeding

February 6, 2013February 5, 2013

News from the John Innes Centre in England

I confess, we had a bit of fun at the expense of the John Innes Centre yesterday. They tweeted:

Crossing wheat and peas – “how to” guides youtube.com/user/jicgermpl… Also new pea variety traced to Rohde,famous gardener us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=43f5e67f7ce…

— John Innes Centre (@JohnInnesCentre) February 4, 2013

Oh, how we laughed. And replied:

MT @johninnescentre: Crossing wheat and peasyoutube.com/user/jicgermpl… < Nice trick if you can pull it off without #GM

— Nikolay Vavilov (@NIVavilov) February 4, 2013

All immensely amusing, but that shouldn’t detract either from the JIC Germplasm YouTube channel — with it’s handy dandy videos explaining how to cross wheats and how to cross peas — or Seed Bank News, to which you can subscribe.

This paragraph caught my eye

One heritage variety of maple or carlin pea has been passed to the collection (JI 3590) that can be traced back to the famous garden historian and horticultural writer Eleanour Sinclair Ronde [sic] in the late 1930’s. This is a culinary long vined type that has been maintained by a family in Shropshire where it has been regularly grown at 1200ft and noted as having a good degree of frost tolerance compared to other common varieties.

As a long-time fan of carlin peas, and all the great stories associated with them, I’d love to know exactly how they traced JI 3590 to Eleanour Sinclair Rohde. But that’s just me.

February 4, 2013February 1, 2013

Brainfood: Vitamin C, Nutrition and health, European protected areas, Coffea diversity, Climate change modelling, Soil microbes, Niche modelling, Conflict, Human modified landscapes, Horse diversity, Pigeon diversity

The challenge of increasing vitamin C content in plant foods. Surely not just because it is challenging?
Health economics and nutrition: a review of published evidence. “[A]pproaches and methodologies are sometimes ad hoc in nature and vary widely in quality.” Ain’t that always the way.
European protected areas: Past, present and future. The future will need to be different from the past.
Genetic structure and diversity of coffee (Coffea) across Africa and the Indian Ocean islands revealed using microsatellites. Good correspondence with morphological species. Madagascar a diversity hotspot.
Special Issue of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology on Agricultural prediction using climate model ensembles. There’s more than one way to identify a potential adaptation hotspot. Well that’s reassuring. Not.
Changes in soil microbial functional diversity under different vegetation restoration patterns for Hulunbeier Sandy Land. Restoring desertified grassland led to more soil microbial diversity. Which is good because…?
A review of composition studies of Cameroon traditional dishes: Macronutrients and minerals. 117 of them. Good for Fe, Zn, Mg.
Essential elements of discourse for advancing the modelling of species’ current and potential distributions. There’s lots of methods, all quite different, embrace the diversity.
Understanding and managing conservation conflicts. Build up an evidence base, and employ some social scientists to explain it.
On the hope for biodiversity-friendly tropical landscapes. In the end, it’s about the agriculture. In more ways than one.
Genetic Diversity in the Modern Horse Illustrated from Genome-Wide SNP Data. High maternal, low paternal during domestication. Low diversity breeds the ones you’d expect. Similar breeds the ones you’d expect.
Genomic Diversity and Evolution of the Head Crest in the Rock Pigeon. Middle Eastern origins, Darwin vindicated. Again.

February 1, 2013February 1, 2013

Nibbles: GUIDs, Cajanus molecular breeding, Slash-and-burn, Rust return, Genomics talkshop, Mobile, Traditional knowledge

Should global unique identifiers (GUIDs) refer to digital records or physical objects? Not sure I’ve ever said anything quite so geeky.
ICRISAT to use molecules to breed pigeonpeas.
Small Amazon farmers not the enemy after all.
Coffee rust never sleeps. Hopefully neither do coffee breeders.
Put 4-24 March in your diary. What do you mean why. FAO Biotechnology Forum e-mail conference on “Current and future impacts of genomics for the crop, forestry, livestock, fishery and agro-industry sectors in developing countries.” That’s why.
Get your mobile data collection solution here.
“Traditional farming hold all the aces.” And yet it must be protected with all kinds of international treaties.

January 30, 2013May 3, 2018

Nibbles: Cluster archive, Plant Press, Yet more quinoa, African viruses, African veggies, Slum livestock, Protected area monitor, Chinese rice variety, Talking shops, PGR course

Another website archiving phylogenetic trees? What are the odds? Well, they are different animals.
Did we ever link to The Plant Press? If not, we should have.
The quinoa controversy rumbles on. We’ve got that covered too. And since you’re at it, why not help revise the descriptors?
Bad news for Africa: plant viruses. Ah but there are varieties for that problem, no? No? Well, you can always highlight the little blighters as research priorities.
Good news for Africa: local vegetables.
Sort of good news for Africa, I guess: livestock in slums.
New website keeps an eye on Protected Area Downgrading, Downsizing, and Degazettement. Interactively, natch. Well, actually, not so much. Can’t export, or import. Maybe the mash-up will fix that. Anyway, most protected areas are in the wrong place, aren’t they?
Conserving Chinese rice, one variety at the time.
Latest installment of The Economist’s Feeding the World thing is happening right now, and you can follow it on Twitter using #feedingtheworld. Or maybe you’d like to re-imagine agriculture with the CGIAR instead?
Apply for the latest installment of Wageningen’s PGR course.

January 29, 2013May 3, 2018

Nibbles: Tree diversity, App diversity, Fish diversity, Botanist diversity, Conifer diversity, Genebank diversity, Cowpea diversity, Eurisco info diversity

You saw it in Brainfood first, but now you can read a whole post about that paper linking tree species diversity with ecosystem services in ConservationBytes.
Natural England launches an app competition. Me, I’d like to see this in an app (cf Australia). Mainly because I remember the days when we had to make such species distribution maps by hand.
WCMC already has plenty of apps, it seems. As does CABI.
Aquatic genetic resources getting catalogued, as a prelude to improved. Maybe they need apps?
RBGE staff have more than an app for capturing data from herbarium sheets. They have a poster.
Bet these Smithsonian guys had neither.
Nor did they have Facebook pages, but the iCONic project does. And I’m sure it will help with protecting those iconic conifers. Geddit?
CIMMYT replies to my query about where those Turkish landraces are going to be conserved. And ACIAR to my query about Timor Leste. What did we do before Twitter?
We would never have got Ghana interested in improved cowpea varieties from Burkina Faso quite so fast before Twitter is my guess. And if the links to the tweets behind these three stories expire, you’ll be pleased to know I’ve storified them. And then had to unsatisfactorily export them to PDF when that website died.
And Eurisco gets an RSS feed to go with that email newsletter!