- How nature-related risks matter to business.
- Exhibit A: beer.
- Exhibit B: wine and wine.
- Looking at it the other way, some infographics to sum up the impact of food production on the environment.
- And then there are nature-based solutions…
- Sometimes companies do good just for the hell of it: e.g. ohia conservation in Hawaii.
- And sometimes it just takes family.
- “Despite the challenges of climate change and state fragility in parts of Africa, the continent has the potential to not only achieve food and nutrition security, but to leverage the food sector for its overall development.”
- Some tips on how to communicate all the above.
Brainfood: Potato genebanks, Aichi 11, Taming foxes, Fruit diversity, Polyploidy review, Evaluating quinoa, Into Africa, IPCC review, Desiccation tolerance, Pig diversity, Oolong diversity, Wild millet, Sustainable diets
- Ex Situ Conservation of Potato [Solanum Section Petota (Solanaceae)] Genetic Resources in Genebanks. The only review of the subject you’ll need. Until the next one.
- Editorial Essay: An update on progress towards Aichi Biodiversity Target 11. Not bad, but the difficult stuff remains difficult. One of several interesting papers.
- The History of Farm Foxes Undermines the Animal Domestication Syndrome. Those Russian foxes were already pretty tame. Here’s a Twitter tread from one of the authors that lays it all out.
- Developing fruit tree portfolios that link agriculture more effectively with nutrition and health: a new approach for providing year-round micronutrients to smallholder farmers. 11 species can address micronutrient gaps.
- Plant Polyploidy: Origin, Evolution, and Its Influence on Crop Domestication. Extreme events and disasters drive polyploidy, which drives diversification at various levels, which facilitates domestication.
- Spectral Reflectance Indices and Physiological Parameters in Quinoa under Contrasting Irrigation Regimes. Phenotyping for drought tolerance from space.
- Asian Crop Dispersal in Africa and Late Holocene Human Adaptation to Tropical Environments. Via NE Africa always something new.
- Invited review: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agriculture, and food — A case of shifting cultivation and history. The IPCC could have done a better job of synthesizing the data on the impact of climate change on crops and livestock.
- Seed comparative genomics in three coffee species identify desiccation tolerance mechanisms in intermediate seeds. Whole bunch of genes involved.
- Capturing genetic diversity – an assessment of the nation’s gene bank in securing Duroc pigs. Genebank doing a pretty good job in this case.
- Genetic diversity of oolong tea (Camellia sinensis) germplasms based on the nanofluidic array of single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers. It’s not all the same.
- Tapping Pennisetum violaceum, a wild relative of pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum), for resistance to blast (caused by Magnaporthe grisea) and rust (caused by Puccinia substriata var. indica). Out of 305 accessions, one was resistant to both diseases. IP21711 if you must know. A few more were resistant to one or the other disease.
- Can Diets Be Healthy, Sustainable, and Equitable? No, and they’ll be difficult to change, but the “burden of change should not be solely placed on the consumer’s ability to make healthy choices.”
Nibbles: USDA maize genebank, Apple breeding, Seed conservation, Soil map, Scoring supermarkets, DNA barcoding, Stone Age Hypoxis, Hybrid wine, Lost crops, Boswellia, Leucokaso, Species mixtures
- Nice student video on the genebank and breeding programmes at Iowa State.
- Speaking of breeding programmes and videos, here’s Sean Myles on his work on apples in Canada.
- Seed conservation legend Richard Ellis on what climate change is doing to seed quality.
- An amazing new global soil properties map is open for business.
- Scoring supermarkets for the human suffering they represent.
- The future of DNA barcoding…is here.
- Cotton 101.
- Strong evidence of Middle Stone Age tuber cooking in southern Africa.
- French wine growers dip a cautious toe into the grapewine interspecific genepool.
- Yields of mixtures of now “lost” native American crops comparable to those of maize.
- The canonical yearly frankincense story in honour of Epiphany.
- Biblical white olive makes a comeback in Italy.
- Useful update of mixture studies.
Brainfood: Food access, Rare species, Italian landraces, Forest status, CC & production, Myanmar nutrition, Super-pangenome, Plant pest priorities, Peanut resistance, Maize coring, EAT-Lancet costs, Sorghum tannins double, Dutch cattle core
- Food Access Deficiencies in Sub-saharan Africa: Prevalence and Implications for Agricultural Interventions. Income doesn’t necessarily translate into better nutrition, but keeping livestock does. Happy New Year.
- The commonness of rarity: Global and future distribution of rarity across land plants. Rare species are especially vulnerable to climate and land use change.
- Exploring on-farm agro-biodiversity: a study case of vegetable landraces from Puglia region (Italy). High vegetable landrace diversity may be linked to poor soils and distance from urban centres.
- Measuring Forest Biodiversity Status and Changes Globally. Combines biodiversity significance and intactness, and comes up with not that many places.
- Escaping the perfect storm of simultaneous climate change impacts on agriculture and marine fisheries. Business as usual means 90% of world’s population will see declines in both agricultural and fisheries production.
- Potential for smart food products in rural Myanmar: use of millets and pigeonpea to fill the nutrition gap. 2 weeks of inclusion had positive effect on wasting, stunting and underweight.
- Super-Pangenome by Integrating the Wild Side of a Species for Accelerated Crop Improvement. Add up species pangenomes for a whole genepool. Would be cool to grow it.
- Plant Pest Impact Metric System (PPIMS): Framework and guidelines for a common set of metrics to classify and prioritise plant pests. Host crop value, market access, feasibility of management and reversibility are the most important ones.
- A new source of root-knot nematode resistance from Arachis stenosperma incorporated into allotetraploid peanut (Arachis hypogaea). You have to cross it with another wild relative first.
- The impact of sample selection strategies on genetic diversity and representativeness in germplasm bank collections. Different approaches to making cores tested with maize data from Seeds of Discovery.
- Affordability of the EAT–Lancet reference diet: a global analysis. US$2.84 per day, or more than household per capita income for at least 1.58 billion people.
- Allelochemicals targeted to balance competing selections in African agroecosystems. Levels of tannins in sorghum correlated with taste receptor variant in humans and presence of sparrows.
- Genetic Architecture of Chilling Tolerance in Sorghum Dissected with a Nested Association Mapping Population. Chilling tolerance associated with low tannin and short stature. No word on the role of sparrows.
- Characterization of Genetic Diversity Conserved in the Gene Bank for Dutch Cattle Breeds. Almost optimized, at least for bulls.
Brainfood: Accessibility data smorgasbord, Microclimate megadataset, Breeding strategies, Aeroponic cassava, Jatropha conservation, Wheat diversity, Botanic gardens, Polyploid duo, Rhizosphere symbiosis, Selfing niches, Pepper priorities, Eggplant core, Ipomoea evolution, Kenyan supermarkets
- A suite of global accessibility indicators. How long it takes to get from anywhere in the world to settlements of different size. Or took, in 2015.
- A method for computing hourly, historical, terrain‐corrected microclimate anywhere on Earth. Why you might want to move in the first place.
- Genetic strategies for improving crop yields. “Valuable genetic diversity for increasing crop resilience resides in cultivated landraces, heirloom varieties and the wild relatives of crops.”
- A low-cost aeroponic phenotyping system for storage root development: unravelling the below-ground secrets of cassava (Manihot esculenta). But sometimes you have to work hard to get at it: case in point.
- High SNP diversity in the non-toxic indigenous Jatropha curcas germplasm widens the potential of this upcoming major biofuel crop species. And here’s another.
- Genome-wide variation patterns between landraces and cultivars uncover divergent selection during modern wheat breeding. In China and Pakistan anyway.
- Plant populations of three threatened species experience rapid evolution under ex situ cultivation. So don’t cultivate, store seeds instead. Or as well.
- Genes derived from ancient polyploidy have higher genetic diversity and are associated with domestication in Brassica rapa. Polyploidy pre-adapts plants for domestication.
- Genome duplication effects on functional traits and fitness are genetic context and species dependent: studies of synthetic polyploid Fragaria. Case in point.
- A mutualistic interaction between Streptomyces bacteria, strawberry plants and pollinating bees. The rhizosphere protects.
- Do selfing species have greater niche breadth? Support from ecological niche modeling. Yes indeed.
- Modelled distributions and conservation status of the wild relatives of chile peppers (Capsicum L.). 50% are high priority for conservation. No word on their mating systems.
- Construction of a core collection of eggplant (Solanum melongena L.) based on genome-wide SNP and SSR genotypes. From 893 to 100, in 4 geographical clusters.
- A taxonomic monograph of Ipomoea integrated across phylogenetic scales. A whole bunch of new species, and evidence that some 60 species independently developed storage roots before humans were even around. Yes, even sweetpotato.
- Supermarket food purchases and child nutrition in Kenya. Not a bad thing.