- Frugivory by carnivores: Black-backed jackals are key dispersers of seeds of the scented !nara melon in the Namib Desert. Jackals pee on wild melon relatives and disperse their seeds, not necessarily in that order.
- Out of the Shadows: Reestablishing the Eastern Fertile Crescent as a Center of Agricultural Origins: Part 1. Go East, young archaeobotanists!
- Extinction risk predictions for the world’s flowering plants to support their conservation. Fancy maths says 45% of angiosperms are potentially threatened. Same for crop wild relatives in the Eastern Fertile Crescent? Black-backed jackals unavailable for comment.
- Global Wild Rice Germplasm Resources Conservation Alliance: WORLD WILD-RICE WIRING. Scientists get together to conserve global wild rice germplasm resources, understand the ecology of wild rice environments, identify and address threats, define effective ways to use wild species in rice improvement, and provide data for decision-making. Not a minute too soon, given the above.
- Morphometric analysis of wild potato leaves. Who needs genotyping anyway.
- Large-scale gene expression alterations introduced by structural variation drive morphotype diversification in Brassica oleracea. Brassica scientists need genotyping, apparently, that’s who.
- Exploring the nutritional potentials of wild Vigna legume species for neo-domestication prospects. Not much potential if they go extinct though. Quick, photograph their leaves!
Nibbles: Indian millets, Indian rice, Neolithic bread, Andean potatoes, UAE genebank, Niger onions, Lentil domestication, Italian rice, Sea cucumber
- The trouble with millets. Because there’s always room for a Star Trek allusion.
- Growing heritage rice varieties in Goa. With hardly any trouble, it seems.
- Really, really old bread. And more from Jeremy.
- Breeding company and CIP collaborating to save potato diversity in the Andes.
- Another genebank opens in the Gulf.
- The story of Niger’s Violet De Galmi onion. Or is it Niger’s?
- The latest crop to be called humble is the lentil.
- New varieties may help save risotto, but better water management will probably have to feature too, I suspect. Otherwise lentils could stand in I suppose.
- In the end, though, maybe we should all just cultivate sea cucumbers.
Brainfood: Software edition
- NBPGR-PDS: A Precision Tool for Plant Germplasm Collecting. Fancy software can manage germplasm collecting info in the field.
- The role of genotypic and climatic variation at the range edge: A case study in winegrapes. Fancy software and analysis can predict how different grape varietals could expand in distribution under climate change.
- ClimMob: Software to support experimental citizen science in agriculture. Fancy software can help plan, manage and analyze large-scale, farmer-led germplasm evaluation trails.
- Herbarium specimen label transcription reimagined with large language models: Capabilities, productivity, and risks. Fancy software can transcribe herbarium labels.
- OliVaR: Improving olive variety recognition using deep neural networks. Fancy software can recognize olives.
- Reconstructing historic and modern potato late blight outbreaks using text analytics. Fancy software can track a pest epidemic.
- Evaluating responses by ChatGPT to farmers’ questions on irrigated lowland rice cultivation in Nigeria. Fancy software can be better than extension workers.
- Simulating pollen flow and field sampling constraints helps revise seed sampling recommendations for conserving genetic diversity. Fancy software and analysis can suggest changes to seed sampling strategies to take into account limited pollen flow.
Nibbles: Cheese microbes, OSSI, Mung bean, Sustainable ag, Agroecology, Collard greens, African orphan crops, Olive diversity, Mezcal threats, German perry, Spanish tomatoes, N fixation
- A sustainable blue cheese industry needs more microbial diversity.
- The Open Source Seed Initiative gets written up in The Guardian. Looks like we need something similar for cheese microbes.
- The Guardian then follows up with mung bean breeding and fart jokes.
- But then goes all serious with talk of trillions of dollars in benefits from sustainable food systems. Diversity not mentioned, alas, though, so one wonders about the point of the previous pieces.
- Fortunately Indigeneous Colombian farmers have the right idea about sustainability.
- Collard greens breeders do too, for that matter.
- More African native crops hype for Dr Wood to object to. Seriously though, some crops do need more research, if only so they can be grown somewhere else.
- There’s plenty of research — and art for that matter — on the olive, but the international genebanks could do with more recognition.
- The mezcal agave, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have much diversity in genebanks, and it is threatened in the wild.
- Perry culture in Germany is also threatened. Pretty sure there are genebanks though.
- This piece about tomato diversity in Spain is worth reading for many reasons (heroic seed saving yada yada), but especially for the deadpan take on the Guardia Civil at the end.
- Maybe we could breed some of those tomatoes to fix their own nitrogen. And get the Guardia Civil to pay for it.
Brainfood: Breeding edition
- Climate-resilient crops: Lessons from xerophytes. Breeding for Na+ exclusion to improve salinity tolerance in crops has compromised their drought tolerance, but both tolerances are down to more gene copies in key families when comparing species.
- Innovation and Technological Mismatch: Experimental Evidence from Improved Crop Seeds. Breeders should strive to give farmers what they want, even if it means releasing multiple locally adapted varieties rather than a single blockbuster.
- Stressors and Resilience within the Cassava Value Chain in Nigeria: Preferred Cassava Variety Traits and Response Strategies of Men and Women to Inform Breeding. Man and women want different things from cassava breeders.
- Intra-household discrete choice experiment for trait preferences: a new method. If only there was a new way to measure that…
- Genome editing to re-domesticate and accelerate use of barley crop wild relatives. No word on whether men and women would edit different genes.
- Understanding Genome Structure Facilitates the Use of Wild Lentil Germplasm for Breeding: A Case Study with Shattering Loci. I suspect neither men nor women would tolerate shattering lentils.
- Repeat turnover meets stable chromosomes: repetitive DNA sequences mark speciation and gene pool boundaries in sugar beet and wild beets. But you can’t use wild species in breeding if you can’t cross them with the crop, and in beet that’s down to the repeatome. So maybe this would make a better case for domestication through gene editing than barley or lentils?
- Development of trait-specific genetic stocks derived from wild Cicer species as novel sources of resistance to important diseases for chickpea improvement. Would be really cool to domesticate one of the really resistant tertiary genepool species.
- Developing Genetic Resources Within the Chenopodium Genus to Advance Quinoa Breeding and the de novo Domestication of C. berlandieri. Not that you need gene editing for domesticating crop wild relatives.
- Genomic traces of Japanese malting barley breeding in two modern high-quality cultivars, ‘Sukai Golden’ and ‘Sachiho Golden’. Old-fashioned breeding has been pretty successful, so who needs CWR, gene editing and discrete choice experiments? ((Last bit added purely for clicks, I’m desperate.))
- Consistent effects of independent domestication events on the plant microbiota. I hope all those gene-editing de novo domesticators are considering the novo microbiomes.