Breeding

July 24, 2012July 23, 2012

The hanging yams of Ibadan

Dr Lopez Montes of @IITA, member of @CGIAR in Ibadan Nigeria showing fast breeding of water yams thru vine cutting pic.twitter.com/Op5W4k3a

— Frank Rijsberman (@FrankRijsberman) July 19, 2012

Intrigued? You can read more about these hanging bags, and how they fit into IITA’s yam development strategy in general, in a recent article in the centre’s very readable R4D Review. ¹

July 20, 2012July 21, 2012

Nibbles: ITPGRFA consultation, Organic Wageningen, Rice good and bad, HarvestXXX, Genebank education, Ethnobiology teaching, YPARD, Wild coffee prospecting, Banana & cereal genomics, In vitro award, Coca Cola and conservation, Sam Dryden, Samara, Taro in Hawaii, Biodiversity and languages, Ancient food

ITPGRFA launches stakeholder consultation on sustainable use. First order of business: figure out what the heck it is.
Maybe Wageningen’s new professor of organic agriculture will know.
IRRI finds healthy rice. Meanwhile, out on the front lines…
HarvestPlus puts out an annual report. HarvestChoice gets to grips with lablab. Yeah I find the whole HarvestFillintheblank thing confusing too.
Nature Education does genebanks. “Ex situ conservation appears to be effective; in situ conservation has few proponents except those who practice it out of necessity.” Whoa, easy, tiger!
And speaking of education, here are some teaching resources in ethnobiology.
Some of which may be useful to interesting yoofs in agriculture?
Raiders of the Lost Coffee Bean? I would have avoided the Indiana Jones parallel, frankly.
How banana and cereals genomics is going to get us all personal jetpacks.
In the meantime, a banana tissue culture expert nabs ICAR Punjabrao Deshmukh Outstanding Woman Scientist Award 2011.
What new technologies would most benefit conservation? DNA and IT, mostly, apparently, naturally.
Coca Cola sustainable agriculture guy mentions pollinator biodiversity but not citrus biodiversity.
Profile of the head of agriculture at the Gates Foundation.
Kew’s Samara does mountain biodiversity, crop wild relatives and much more besides.
Taro research in Hawaii summarized in a nice PDF.
Biological and linguistic diversity go together like a, what, horse and carriage?
The medieval fall of the Irish cow. And the Harappan origins of the curry. Esoteric, moi?

July 9, 2012July 10, 2012

Bananas in Bogor: be there

Banana breeders — and others with an interest — are meeting in Bogor to discuss, er, banana breeding under the auspices, I believe, of Musanet and the Global Crop Diversity Trust. ²

Our very own Luigi Guarino is there for his day job, tweeting up a storm at #musanet. They’re lucky to have him. And so are we. One fascinating idea already from Jim Lorenzen of IITA: resynthesize the banana. How cool would that be? ³

LATER: This is not a new idea, as this extract on CIRAD’s work from a 2008 book shows.

July 9, 2012July 5, 2012

Brainfood: Red meat, Chocolate quality, Shea and livelihoods, Modeling extinction, Living collections, Sorghum & millet breeding, Hotspots, Ancient sesame, Breeding lovefest

Red meat in global nutrition. Not as bad as people say. But then the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association would say that, wouldn’t they.
Optimizing chocolate production through traceability: A review of the influence of farming practices on cocoa bean quality. Manufacturers really need data on how the crop was grown.
Contribution of “Women’s Gold” to West African Livelihoods: The Case of Shea (Vitellaria paradoxa) in Burkina Faso. It is high, especially for the poorest households, for women, and when other sources of income are scarce.
Herbarium records do not predict rediscovery of presumed nationally extinct species. Fancy probabilistic models based on number of sightings in different time periods are pretty useless predictors of whether news of the demise of a species was exaggerated.
The importance of living botanical collections for plant biology and the “next generation” of evo-devo research. “Next generation” sequencing pretty useless without the actual plants in “last generation” genebanks and “first generation” botanical gardens/arboreta. Don’t believe me? Here come the vignettes.
Breeding Strategies for Adaptation of Pearl Millet and Sorghum to Climate Variability and Change in West Africa. Involve farmers, bank on diversity, support seed systems.
Plant species richness: the world records. They’re only found in oligo- to meso-trophic, managed, semi-natural, temperate grasslands and tropical rain forests.
Sesame Utilization in China: New Archaeobotanical Evidence from Xinjiang. 5kg of white sesame seeds in a nice jug at the Thousand Buddha Grottoes at Boziklik dating from ca. 700 years BP means the crop was, well, used at that time and place.
The twenty-first century, the century of plant breeding. Accentuate the positive.

July 6, 2012July 6, 2012

Nibbles: Social CRP, Coconut genebank, Rice breeding, Conservation debate, Mongolian herders, American chestnut, Marine conservation

CGIAR Research Programme on Roots, Tuber and Bananas gets a blog to go with its Facebook page and Twitter feed.
Coconut clones? I don’t think so.
Rice yield gene? I don’t think so.
NY Times hosts a debate on conservation, and genebanks get a look-in.
Mongolia’s reindeer herders get some advice.
“My great grandfather’s legacy is something I grew up knowing and respecting, but my parents’ conservation ethic is something that I have always lived.”
Marine reserves can be good for fish. And abalone?