- Special Journal issue on Environmental changes and pre-Columbian human influence in the Amazon region.
- Porn on the cob. A smut story with a headline so good, I’m sure to steal it.
- A practical field manual cum guide to Improving nutrition with agricultural biodiversity.
- Ag researchers “speak with a single voice” to “call on climate negotiators to endorse a work programme for agriculture”. We shall see.
- And will it come in time to Save the Walnut?
- New book on “Custodians of Biodiversity“.
- Brussels Briefing on Food Price Volatility. Today! Soon!
- China hears how Kenyan farmers can benefit from traditional vegetables.
- “Are plants like us?” It depends …
- A minor increase in biodiversity protects peaches from nematode pests.
- Climate change in the Pacific: The problem, according to the Aussies. The solution, according to the ADB.
Brainfood: OSP adoption, Milk quality, Passport data quality, Historical collections, Sweet potato domestication, African veggies, Baobab diversity and domestication, Cassava diversity, Strawberry breeding, Barley GWA, Pest symbionts, Maize diversity and climate change
- A large-scale intervention to introduce orange sweet potato in rural Mozambique increases vitamin A intakes among children and women. Just 1 year of training worked just as well as a higher intensity intervention (3 years) in increasing OSP and vitamin A intake by younger children, older children and women, and decreasing prevalence of inadequate vitamin A intakes. OSP represented about half of all sweet potatoes consumed so I guess there was not complete replacement of local varieties.
- Composition of milk from minor dairy animals and buffalo breeds: a biodiversity perspective. There are significant interbreed and inter-species differences. Dromedary milk is closest to cow milk, mare and donkey milk maybe the healthiest, but moose milk is the one I’d like to try.
- Quality indicators for passport data in ex situ genebanks. That would be the genebanks in Eurisco. Verdict: not bad, but could do better. Most variation in quality is among institutes.
- Exploring the population genetics of genebank and historical landrace varieties. Old samples of dead seeds of 4 crops in Swedish museum jars more genetically variable than genebank accessions, but it’s not the genebank’s fault. And at least their seeds are still alive. Also no genetic correspondence between geographically matched museum and genebank samples.
- Combining chloroplast and nuclear microsatellites to investigate origin and dispersal of New World sweet potato landraces. Two areas of domestication, probably from a single wild progenitor species: lowland NW South America and lowland Central America/Caribbean. Genetic differences between these 2 genepools not accompanied by morphological differences, but then again nobody’s looked properly, and the current descriptors are useless anyway.
- The significance of African vegetables in ensuring food security for South Africa’s rural poor. Their huge potential is being thwarted by evil extensionists. Ok, but don’t we need to move beyond that?
- Comparative study on baobab fruit morphological variation between western and south-eastern Africa: opportunities for domestication. Hang on a minute, aren’t there a million factsheets about all this?
- Marriage exchanges, seed exchanges, and the dynamics of manioc diversity. Kinship structures determine cassava diversity patterns in Gabon. Matrilineal societies have more diversity.
- Interspecific hybridization of diploids and octoploids in strawberry. You get pentaploid and tetraploid plants.
- Genome wide association analyses for drought tolerance related traits in barley (Hordeum vulgare L.). Ok, deep breath. Over 200 accessions, both wild and cultivated, from 30 countries, so quite variable, but also structured. There were some QTLs that differed between dry and wet sites, but they didn’t explain much phenotypic variation, and they couldn’t be related to previous work. So GWA not much use, probably because of population structure. But couldn’t that have been predicted? And isn’t it possible to do something about structure in the analysis?
- Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Mostly proteobacteria. So my question is, could somehow attacking the symbionts form the basis of a pest management strategy?
- Projecting the effects of climate change on the distribution of maize races and their wild relatives in Mexico. Many races and wild relatives are predicted to shift in geographic distribution. Unless of course agronomy intervenes. Teocinte taxa should be collected.
Nibbles: Q&A, Zoopharmacognosy, Pigeonpea genome, Turkey, Wheat relatives
- Everyday agriculture mysteries solved.
- Other animals self-medicate too.
- Dueling pigeonpea genome sequencers? Who knew. Well spotted, James.
- I’m thankful for turkeys.
- And for the crop wild relatives in ICARDA’s genebank too.
Nibbles: Heirloom cattle, Saleb, Wheat protein, Dog domestication, Rooibos
- Why Highland Cattle? Because they look so cool, of course.
- It’s sahlib time!
- Australians find the extra gluten protein gene they need in Italian wheat.
- Where the hell was the dog domesticated?
- Rooibos tea is latest climate change victim.
Some faba beans, without the nice Chianti
If you’re a faba bean breeder interested in cold tolerance you will have come across a paper recently in GRACE the title of which will have set your pulse racing: Screening and selection of faba beans (Vicia faba L.) for cold tolerance and comparison to wild relatives. ((Inci, N., & Toker, C. (2011). Screening and selection of faba beans (Vicia faba L.) for cold tolerance and comparison to wild relatives Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution, 58 (8), 1169-1175 DOI: 10.1007/s10722-010-9649-2)) And if you had skimmed ahead to the conclusion you would have found it difficult to contain your excitement.
In conclusion, some faba bean accessions were selected for cold tolerance and desirable agronomic characteristics. ACV-42, ACV-84 and ACV-88 were selected as highly cold tolerant. These sources of cold tolerance could be used to improve cold tolerance level in faba bean breeding programs.
You would then have gone back and read the paper thoroughly to find more information on these previous accessions, and in particular on where to get hold of them. But you would have been disappointed, and you might very well have moved dejectedly onto the next paper in your Google alert.
Fortunately I am made of sterner stuff. So, thanks to an email to the authors, I can now tell you that
ACV-42 = TR 31590 at the Aegean Agricultural Research Institute, Izmir, Turkey
ACV-84 = IG 14048 at ICARDA
ACV-88 = IG 72247 also at ICARDA
And, thanks to Genesys, I can add that IG 14048 is a Polish landrace called Debek and IG 72247 is from Canada and has at some point had the number “73 Rm 70”, though I can find no reference to this in GRIN-Canada. Neither Eurisco nor Genesys has the Turkish genebank’s faba bean data, and their website was down when I tried it today, so I can’t tell you anything about TR 31590, I’m afraid.
You’re welcome.
And here’s a bit of a bonus for you. The paper also drops the fact that
The best known freezing tolerant genotype is a French genotype ‘Cote d’Or’ which can survive –22ºC if previously hardened…
Well, being a faba bean breeder interested in cold tolerance you probably already know that, and have it, but in case you’ve run out or something, Genesys/Eurisco says you can get it in a couple of different genebanks, including CGN in the Netherlands. ((Our friends at CGN are, incidentally, behind a recent paper looking at the completeness of the passport data in the Eurisco dataset. Their findings in a nutshell: not a bad effort, but could do better.))
Now, to feed back that evaluation information on ACV 42, 84 and 88 — and indeed all the other hundred-odd accessions evaluated in the paper — to the genebanks from whence they came, to make life that little bit easier for the next faba bean breeder interested in cold tolerance breeder…