- Plant diversity modifies multi-trophic interactions in croplands, grasslands and forests. Increasing plant diversity changes the interactions between plants, herbivores and their natural enemies, but exactly how depends on the ecosystem. Diversification’s pest-suppression magic looks like a farming-specific trick, not a universal law.
- High-resolution carbon and biodiversity mapping shows correlated losses across space and agricultural products. Carbon loss and biodiversity loss from farming turn out to hit the same ground: two-thirds of both concentrated on one-third of agricultural land, with beef and milk alone responsible for 41% of the biodiversity damage. Good news for anyone hoping one policy lever could do double duty.
- Harnessing agri-food system microbiomes for sustainability and human health. Soil to gut, it’s all one network, linking ecosystem function, food production and human health across the entire agri-food system.
- Breeding for beneficial microbial associations. If microbiomes matter that much, why not breed for them? A proposed framework pairs crop traits that recruit good microbes (root exudates, architecture) with soil practices that keep those microbes around, since good genetics on ruined soil gets you nowhere. This means designing crops as participants in ecological networks rather than as isolated organisms.
- Host genetics and social relationships jointly shape fitness-associated microbiome variation in a population of feral horses. Nature’s own microbiome-breeding program: seven years of horse poop from Sable Island shows gut microbes predict winter survival, and related horses share microbes more than chance allows. So the functional unit of adaptation is the animal plus its microbiome.
Nibbles: Amaranth webinar, FARA on fonio, Maslin, Gaza genebank, Nepal seeds, Golden Triangle tea
- New webinar series from the American Society of Plant Biologists will explore how underutilized (or is it opportunity) crops like amaranth can contribute to nutrition, food security and rural livelihoods.
- FARA highlights the tiny West African grain fonio as another crop with potential to improve nutrition, strengthen food systems and create new opportunities for farmers and value chains.
- Taiwanese tea has travelled an unlikely route into northern Thailand. It too was an opportunity crop at one time.
- Ethiopian farmers may have been practising regenerative agriculture for millennia, mixing wheat, barley and other grains in the same field. The Rockefeller Foundation is on it.
- Efforts to restore the Al Qarara Seed Bank in Gaza are offering a small but significant form of agricultural recovery.
- In Nepal, indigenous seeds are losing ground to hybrids, but seed advocates are fighting back.
50 years of cassava diversity: what went into the bank, and what came out
Two new papers in Plants, published two months apart, tell the story of CIAT’s cassava genebank 1 from opposite ends: how the collection was assembled and conserved, and what breeders have actually done with it. Read together, they amount to a remarkably candid 50-year audit of a slow-motion agricultural asset. I’ll just give you the main beats here. It’s really worth reading both papers in full.
Part I is the origin story. Botanist Victor Manuel Patiño’s 1969–70 expeditions alone brought in roughly a third of today’s 5,000 or so cassava landraces, transported as stem cuttings across Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and beyond, often in difficult conditions and under changing quarantine rules.
The collection has its blind spots: Brazil and the Guianas remain poorly represented 2, passport information can be patchy, and the overwhelmingly male composition of historical collecting teams probably meant that some of the varietal knowledge held by women farmers went unrecorded.
Conservation itself has been a moving target. It has evolved from field genebanks to in vitro slow-growth tissue culture storage after a frogskin-disease scare forced the field collection to close in 2003, and now cryopreservation at CIAT’s Future Seeds facility. Meanwhile, DNA fingerprinting keeps revealing an awkward truth familiar to genebank curators everywhere: the names people give varieties and the genetic identities of the material do not always agree. A lot of effort over the years has also gone into testing for pathogens to ensure that distribution is safe.
Part II asks what all this diversity is actually for? The answer has also changed considerably over five decades. Early researchers chased traits such as high protein and low cyanogenic content before turning towards yield and starch percentage in the Green Revolution era.
The payoffs have been considerable: landraces have contributed traits such as resistance to pests and diseases, adaptation to acid soils and highland cold, and quality traits for fresh-market cooking versus industrial starch. The route from accession to released variety is rarely direct: a landrace gets screened for a trait, crossed, then recombined and selected over several more generations before anything reaches a farmer’s field. The results include varieties like Nataima-3, bred for whitefly resistance thanks to an Ecuadorian landrace. At the same time, the authors argue that cassava breeding now needs to move beyond broad phenotypic selection towards more systematic use of inbred lines, because the crop’s high heterozygosity makes the introduction of specific traits particularly difficult.
The two papers therefore tell a big story about genebanks. Collecting diversity is only the beginning; its value is realized decades later, when a breeder encounters a problem that nobody could have anticipated when the stuff was first collected. The cassava collection is a long-term portfolio of biological options, one whose contents have taken half a century to assemble, whose inventory is still being corrected, and whose most valuable assets may be the ones that have not yet been used.
A new project is looking to genetically engineer cassava to photosynthesize more efficiently at higher temperatures. I do wonder whether someone has already checked whether any of those 5,000 landraces might help with that. Maybe they can’t, but it’s worth having a look. And you never know, something else of interest might jump out. That’s the beauty of large international collections of crop diversity such as CIAT’s.
Brainfood: Mung bean pan-genome, Sunflower resistance, Olive adaptation, Allergic peanuts, Weird coffees, Chinese tea, Measuring selection
- Graph-based pan-genome reveals structural variations associated with agronomic traits in mung bean. Pan-genome captures extensive structural variation missed by a single reference genome, providing new targets for mung bean improvement.
- Wild genes to the rescue: high-throughput genomics reveals the wild source of broomrape resistance in sunflower. Combining high-throughput root phenotyping with genomics identifies wild introgressions underlying broomrape resistance in sunflower and exposes valuable adaptive variation for breeding.
- Genomic insights into the local adaptation of spontaneous olive trees in the Mediterranean Basin highlight the need for conservation planning in the face of global change. Genomics of wild West Mediterranean olive trees reveals patterns of local adaptation across temperature and rainfall gradients that it will be important to conserve as climates change.
- Genetic regulation of major immunogenic protein accumulation in peanut seeds. Genomics provides targets for breeding peanuts with reduced allergenicity.
- Genomic elucidation of hybridization between Liberica and excelsa coffee and its implications for coffee crop development. Genomics confirms that Liberica and excelsa coffee readily hybridize and produce fertile, genetically diverse offspring with intermediate agronomic traits, a possible source of diversity to broaden coffee’s climate resilience.
- Simple sequence repeat (SSR) marker-based genetic diversity and population structure of large-leaf tea germplasm across four major tea-producing regions of Yunnan, China. Genomics of Yunnan’s large-leaf tea germplasm finds substantial genetic diversity but remarkably little regional differentiation, showing that seed propagation, natural crossing and human movement have maintained genetic connectivity across tea-growing regions.
- Measuring maternal line selection driven by differential survival in ex situ collections for plant conservation. A new method distinguishes random mortality from selection among maternal lines in ex situ collections, offering conservationists a way to detect whether plant deaths are systematically eroding the genetic variation they are trying to preserve. And no genomics involved.
Nibbles: Processing, Shōjin Ryōri, Philippines landraces, National Soybean Germplasm Collection, Kazakhstan genebank, Reading chocolate, Parmesan bank
- Grinding, fermenting, and detoxifying our way to bigger brains — an anthropologist makes the case that food processing, historically women’s work, did as much for human evolution as the mammoth-spearing got credit for.
- Speaking of transforming raw ingredients into something civilization-defining: a Japanese temple has been quietly perfecting vegan cooking for 700 years, no marketing department required.
- Meanwhile in the Philippines, Naturland, the international association for organic farming from Germany, is linking up with Global Seed Savers Philippines, to help farmers get their hands on indigenous crop diversity before it disappears.
- If you want to see what “future-proofing seeds” looks like at scale, the National Soybean Germplasm Collection just turned 100: a century of squirreling away soybean diversity, just in case.
- Kazakhstan wants in on the squirreling too: plans are moving forward for a new genebank to safeguard agricultural biodiversity across Islamic Organization for Food Security member states.
- The University of Reading is also 100, and in celebration scientists there harvested beans from its cacao collection (yes, it has a cacao collection) to make Britain’s first homegrown chocolate bar since 1932, a novelty act with a serious undertone: climate change is squeezing cacao’s traditional growing belt.
- And in Italy, the squeeze is already showing up on the balance sheet: Parmesan’s “Fort Knox” — $350 million of cheese squirreled away as loan collateral — is feeling the heat, with rising cooling costs and falling yields rattling wine and olive oil too.