- Wild spuds to the rescue.
- Won’t be much use in NW Nigeria, alas.
- Livestock might, though.
- Wait wait wait…
- Ok, start again, how about wild rice in situ then?
A bean thread for the ages
Since I’m on a Twitter thread kick, get a load of this mega-thread on beans from Jorge Berny.
Beans are getting popular and they have helped me endure grad school. I´ll post some of my favorites while this pandemic endures.
Tzama´ are mostly grown in Southern Mexico, Belize and Guatemala. Planted later, as a relay after maize, with a shorthish cycle. Tasty AF. pic.twitter.com/OqAnRedHk7
— Jorge C. Berny Mier y Teran (@JorgeCBerny) March 26, 2020
Here’s the ThreadReader version for those of you who are averse to Twitter. Epic.
And, you can even wear them.
Nibbles: NordGen, Xylella, Finger millet, Indian genebanks, Seed saver
- NordGen genebank information system gets a boost.
- Uji for everyone in Kenya, thanks to genebank and breeding.
- Assam’s government supports a field genebank. One of many such efforts in India.
- Will Bonsall‘s genebank needs help. Maybe should move to India.
- Video on the Italian olive plague. This is why we need genebanks.
Brainfood: Now what edition
- Image-Based Goat Breed Identification and Localization Using Deep Learning. Fancy maths can identify goat breeds from photos. Ok, cool, now what?
- AI Naturalists Might Hold the Key to Unlocking Biodiversity Data in Social Media Imagery. Fancy math can often identify common flowers on Flickr. Ok, cool, now what?
- FoodMine: Exploring Food Contents in Scientific Literature. Fancy maths can trawl the literature to pick out the chemical components of different foods. Ok, cool, I guess, now what?
- Cultural and linguistic diversities are underappreciated pillars of biodiversity. Well, yeah. But now what?
- Global priority areas for ecosystem restoration. Fancy maths says restoring 15% of converted lands in identified priority areas could avoid 60% of expected extinctions while sequestering 30% of the total CO2 increase in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Cool, now what?
- An unexpectedly large count of trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel. Wait, does that mean some of the above won’t be necessary?
- Cost and affordability of nutritious diets at retail prices: Evidence from 177 countries. Fancy maths shows that nutritious diets are almost 3 times as expensive as diets supplying basic energy needs, and costs increase with remoteness. Ok, cool, now what?
- Phylogenetic inference enables reconstruction of a long-overlooked outbreak of almond leaf scorch disease (Xylella fastidiosa) in Europe. The olive plague started on almonds. Ok, now what though?
- Genome-wide association study in accessions of the mini-core collection of mungbean (Vigna radiata) from the World Vegetable Gene Bank (Taiwan). Genotyping, phenotyping and fancy maths find that mungbean could grow in temperate conditions. Ok, cool, now what?
- Enhancing the searchability, breeding utility, and efficient management of germplasm accessions in the USDA−ARS rice collection. Genotyping and fancy maths can improve genebank management. Well, yeah, but now what? No, wait, we know exactly now what: digital genebanks!
- Ok, that was a bit of fun, but the important point is that research, no matter how cool, is only the beginning.
Nibbles: Vanilla, Maize vid, CIMMYT lines, Personal genebank, Fruit diversity
- Trees help natural enemies of pests in vanilla plantations.
- Cool video by Sherry Flint-Garcia on the history of maize. And its genetics.
- CIMMYT releases a bunch of interesting maize pre-breeding products, though they don’t call them that.
- Retired Turkish teacher starts seed bank.
- Area man is really into fruits.