- Why did the Chinese chicken cross the road? To get a new date. For domestication, that is.
- The Indian Farmer is actually three, millet-wise.
- USDA wades into specialty crops. Wonder if one of them is baobab, and a factsheet is involved. Or “small scale grains” for that matter.
- “Life in the countryside is hard.” But fear not, FAO is on it.
- Forests are not migrating. Species are actually undergoing range contraction at both ends. Well that’s weird.
- The first pheasant extinction? Say it ain’t so.
- I like pictures of old trees. So sue me.
- Jess stops traffic.
- Tour a cocoa genebank. Could this catch on?
- International Conference on Climate Change and Food Security (ICCCFS). Not hot air.
Brainfood: Ectomycorrhiza, Synthetic peanuts, Ancient Greek amphorae, European bison, Pea breeding, Animal domestication
- Ectomycorrhizas and climate change. One more damn thing to worry about.
- Meiotic analysis of the hybrids between cultivated and synthetic tetraploid groundnuts. It’s normal. The meiosis I mean. Why isn’t this sort of thing done with more crops?
- Aspects of Ancient Greek trade re-evaluated with amphora DNA evidence. More than just wine and olive oil.
- Reconstructing range dynamics and range fragmentation of European bison for the last 8000 years. More eastern and northern than thought, and more affected by the spread of farming than climate change in the Holocene.
- Resistance to downy mildew (Peronospora viciae) in Australian field pea germplasm (Pisum sativum). It comes from Afghanistan.
- Deciphering the genetic basis of animal domestication. Despite all that selection and all those bottlenecks, they really are diverse.
Don’t forget the open Mendeley group for the papers we link to here.
Nibbles: Book, Breeding, Labour, Tallante’s chickpea, Bacardi yeast, Solutions, Sandwiches, Mapping resistance, Cucumber history, Maya nuts
- Can a person called Rushing really have written a book on Slow Gardening?
- Genetic Engineering vs. Breeding. No contest, really.
- Georgia peaches, rotting in the sun. Can the consequences of clamping down on immigrant labour really have been unintended?
- Tallante’s chickpea back from the brink. No, I don’t know why as species of Astragalus is called a chickpea. Is it even a CWR?
- Bacardi and its yeast. A tale of derring-do and intellectual property rights. h/t CAS-IP.
- Back40 takes aim at Solutions for a Cultivated Planet, so we don’t have to.
- UK productivity 5,263 beef sandwiches per hectare(bsp/h), compared to 2,439 bsp/h in the mid-18th century. h/t The Tracing Paper.
- Another great interactive map, this time of bacterial diversity of the worst kind.
- Cucumbers in Europe: a history. AoB blog explains all.
- The good old Maya nut to the rescue again.
Banana threat averted? Not quite yet
Strange news from Scidev.net, which reports that:
[R]esults of a field study in Davao City, on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, show that two Cavendish varieties are highly resistant to Panama disease.
These varieties, he said, were produced in Taiwan by selecting improved mutants from the Cavendish variety.
Why strange? For one thing, because Cavendish bananas have long been resistant to Panama disease. That’s why they are so widespread, because they replaced Gros Michel, the previous dominant variety, which was wiped out commercially by Panama disease in the 1950s and 1960s.
To give credit, Scidev.net explains that the threat is a new form of Panama disease, which is caused by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum, known as Tropical Race 4. Cavendish was resistant to race 1 of Fusarium wilt, to which Gros Michel was susceptible. Tropical Race 4 attacks Cavendish too. But not, according to the report, all Cavendish plants. Some clones, like those ones from Taiwan, are showing resistance.
Strange too because the thrust of the Scidev.net piece is that Filipino scientists are calling on the government to establish a National Research, Development and Extension Center for Banana. But hang on. Tropical Race 4 is a global menace. The very fact that Taiwanese selections are showing promise on Mindanao in the Philippines should give pause.
Wouldn’t it be much more efficient for all governments in the region and beyond to contribute to a global effort? The big banana concerns were to some extent to blame for the demise of Gros Michel and the march of Panama disease, as they abandoned infected plantations and brought new areas into cultivation until there was nowhere left to run and they had to switch. This time around, they could support a globally co-ordinated effort to find and distribute more resistant varieties.
Nibbles: GMO tomatoes, Achocha, Biofortified beans,
- “These awful tomatoes are genetically modified organisms, (GMOs)”. Oh, really? I do wish I didn’t have to naysay quite so often.
- Cyclanthera pedata, in all its Himalayan glory. I’ve grown achocha, and it is a wonderful plant to have around. There, I yea-sayed!
- A new spin on “biofortified”. Beans biofortied “against excess heat, drought, water and pests”.