Breeding – Page 56 – Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

February 19, 2021February 26, 2021

Watch and learn

The annual courses organized by Wageningen University on Plant Genetic Resources and Resilient Seed Systems for Sustainable Food Security and on Contemporary Approaches to Genetic Resources Conservation and Use will be online this year. Find out more and apply.

Oh, wait, so will EUCARPIA’s international conference on Breeding and Seed Sector Innovations for Organic Food Systems.

Anybody zoomed out yet?

February 18, 2021March 1, 2021

Toolbox tuber released

The Toolbox offers a collection of 11 tools that help diagnose, evaluate and improve seed systems of banana, cassava, potato, sweet potato, and yam. These tools can be used by researchers, policy makers, and practitioners working on seed systems of these crops.

Interested? The launch is on 2 March and you can register for the online event.

They’ll help with that pesky adoption gap, hopefully.

February 17, 2021February 17, 2021

Nibbles: Goodness edition

What makes a good seed?
What makes good seed conservation?
No, really, what makes good seed conservation?
What makes better seeds?
What makes good seed planting?
What makes a good tree for seed planting?

February 16, 2021February 15, 2021

Nibbles: Breeding conference, Anthropology conference, Ecosystem services, Quality of life, Gates on CGIAR, Cost of diets

The 10th Annual Cornell Plant Breeding Symposium is coming up in April.
The Anthropology and Conservation Virtual Conference is coming up in October.
How much is a farm worth, environmentally speaking? Plant breeders and anthropologists invited to reply.
How much is nature worth to quality of life?
How much is the research of CGIAR worth?
How much does a healthy diet cost?
The oldest beer factor? Priceless?

February 15, 2021February 5, 2021

Brainfood: Bird shit, Ancient Greece, Maize adaptation, Resistant peanut, Adaptive variation, Crop models, AA bananas, Wild wheat, Wild tomatoes, Switchgrass diversity, Phytosanitation, Rice breeding, Seeds 4 Needs double, Wild palm, Threatened biodiversity

‘White gold’ guano fertilizer drove agricultural intensification in the Atacama Desert from ad 1000. And maize was at the heart of it.
What’s new during the first millennium BCE in Greece? Archaeobotanical results from Olynthos and Sikyon. Not maize, alas, but what you’d expect, plus pine and sesame.
Local adaptation contributes to gene expression divergence in maize. Stress-response genes are the ones which have been selected. No word on whether any of them were important in the Atacama.
Genotyping tools and resources to assess peanut germplasm: smut-resistant landraces as a case study. Ok, so it sounds like the resistant line that was previously used is virtually identical to an accession in the USDA collection.
Do We Need to Identify Adaptive Genetic Variation When Prioritizing Populations for Conservation? No, but we’ll need it to prioritize use, surely?
Incorporating Realistic Trait Physiology into Crop Growth Models to Support Genetic Improvement. We’ll need better growth models too.
Wild to domesticates: genomes of edible diploid bananas hold traces of several undefined genepools. 3 of them, in fact, in both SE Asia and New Guinea.
Evolution of the bread wheat D-subgenome and enriching it with diversity from Aegilops tauschii. Three lineages were involved in the hybridizations that led to bread wheat. Coincidence?
De novo genome assembly of two tomato ancestors, Solanum pimpinellifolium and Solanum lycopersicum var. cerasiforme, by long-read sequencing. Thousands of genes not found in the cultivated crop, apparently.
Genomic mechanisms of climate adaptation in polyploid bioenergy switchgrass. Introgression from the northern genepool (one of three) was really important in adaptation after the glaciers retreated. Gene duplication also involved in adaptation.
Economic Studies Reinforce Efforts to Safeguard Specialty Crops in the United States. Where “safeguard” means “provide clean planting material.”
Comparative analysis of genetic diversity of rice (Oryza sativa L.) varieties cultivated in different periods in China. Diversity went up, then down, between the 1980s and the 2010s.
Wheat Varietal Diversification Increases Ethiopian Smallholders’ Food Security: Evidence from a Participatory Development Initiative. Why the diversity in breeding programmes is important, and how farmer participation can help maintain it.
The tricot citizen science approach applied to on-farm variety evaluation: methodological progress and perspectives. How to do the above.
Biodiversity and conservation of Phoenix canariensis: a review. A wild relative in trouble, and what to do about it.
Tropical and Mediterranean biodiversity is disproportionately sensitive to land-use and climate change. As can be seen from the above.