Breeding

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. ¹

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? ²

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?

July 5, 2012July 5, 2012

Nibbles: Wild goat, Heirlooms, Queen’s garden, Baobabs, Bison demise, Friendly yeast, Peruvian potatoes, Saline rice

Old goat redux.
A really nothing piece in the Washington Post about heirlooms.
This is more like it: take home the Queen’s heirlooms. Well, almost.
Here’s a baobab truly worthy of a factsheet.
It was international trade that wiped out the bison.
Fundamentals of On-Farm Plant Breeding Course: The Video.
Another use for yeast.
The Parque de la Papa highlighted. But doesn’t say seeds are even going to Svalbard.
Salinity tolerance in rice: in Goa, and at IRRI.

July 4, 2012July 4, 2012

GCP mounts a full frontal info-attack

CGIAR’s Generation Challenge Programme is mounting a reasonably effective information blitzkrieg, and chickpeas are the shock troops, with blog posts and videos their weapons of choice. A minor triumph is in the offing on the social networking front. But I have to say I think the RSS feeds are a bit of a rout. The main site has way too many. Yet the blogs over at GCP’s main online product, the otherwise quite impressive Integrated Breeding Platform, don’t have any at all, though the discussion forums (and what exactly is the difference?) do. Time to re-think the whole RSS strategy.