- Milk of ruminants in ceramic baby bottles from prehistoric child graves. Neolithic sippy cups. Cute.
- Heat and Drought Stress Advanced Global Wheat Harvest Timing from 1981–2014. 2.5 days per decade.
- A strong east–west Mediterranean divergence supports a new phylogeographic history of the carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua, Leguminosae) and multiple domestications from native populations. No evidence of an eastern refugium.
- Value chains to improve diets: Diagnostics to support intervention design in Malawi. You can modify existing social protection interventions to optimize diets (including increasing diet diversity) by enhancing public- and private-sector linkages.
- Contemporary evolution of maize landraces and their wild relatives influenced by gene flow with modern maize varieties. Landrace genetic diversity actually increased due to introgression from modern varieties.
- Ancient genomes reveal early Andean farmers selected common beans while preserving diversity. Because they applied weak selection. Can breeders learn from this? Also, is it similar for maize?
- Reconstruction of nine thousand years of agriculture-based diet and impact on human genetic diversity in Asia. Changes in diet through domestication and processing have left signatures on the human genome.
- Transgressive segregations for agronomic improvement using interspecific crosses between C. arietinum L. x C. reticulatum Ladiz. and C. arietinum L. x C. echinospermum Davis species. For things like pod number, earliness and tolerance to cold.
- Linking global crop and livestock consumption to local production hotspots. China is the largest consumer of primary crops, and the third largest consumer of livestock. The Corn Belt, cerrado, Europe and E. China feeds it, and the world.
- How conservation initiatives go to scale. With great difficulty.
- Morphometrics Reveals Complex and Heritable Apple Leaf Shapes. It’s mainly about aspect ratio.
- Nutrient and Antinutrient Composition of Winged Bean (Psophocarpus tetragonolobus (L.) DC.) Seeds and Tubers. The best, and worst, among 50 accessions. Spoiler alert: it depends on the nutrient, and on whether you prefer the seeds or tubers.
- Identification of Founding Accessions and Patterns of Relatedness and Inbreeding Derived from Historical Pedigree Data in a White Clover Germplasm Collection in New Zealand. 15,000 accessions trace to about 175 founders.
- Poverty not taste drives the consumption of protected species in Madagascar. Let them eat domestic livestock meat.
Brainfood: Tea diversity, Sorghum CWR, Wine certification, Salty maize, Broadening cacao, Wild emmer evolution, Wheat breeding, Nutrition info, Indian rice, Dietary diversity treble, Potato enhancement
- Assessment of Genetic Diversity of Tea Germplasm for Its Management and Sustainable Use in Korea Genebank. There’s not enough.
- Crop wild relatives as a genetic resource for generating low-cyanide, drought-tolerant Sorghum. From Australia, of all places.
- Consumers’ preferences for biodiversity in vineyards: a choice experiment on wine. Even buyers of cheap plonk are willing to pay for biodiversity.
- Characterization of natural genetic variation identifies multiple genes involved in salt tolerance in maize. 8 of them, at least.
- Extending the cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) gene pool with underrepresented genotypes: growth and yield traits. Lots of potential for broadening the base of the crop in West Africa.
- Elevated mutation and selection in wild emmer wheat in response to 28 years of global warming. Evolution continues, but not necessarily in a good way.
- Genetic Gains in Wheat Breeding and Its Role in Feeding the World. Focusing on ICARDA and CIMMYT. How much would have been possible without the genebanks?
- Agriculture–nutrition linkages in farmers’ communication networks. You can spread nutrition information through existing agricultural extension channels, but you have to be gender sensitive and some people may be excluded. Twas ever thus.
- Population genetics analyses of North-East Indian indigenous rice landraces revealed divergent history and alternate origin of aroma in aus group. A real melting pot.
- Review: Meta-analysis of the association between production diversity, diets, and nutrition in smallholder farm households. Increasing production diversity won’t always lead to improved diets. But it could.
- Farm-Level Agricultural Biodiversity in the Peruvian Andes Is Associated with Greater Odds of Women Achieving a Minimally Diverse and Micronutrient Adequate Diet. Like here for instance.
- Farm-Level Agricultural Biodiversity Is Not the Principal Contributor to Diverse and Micronutrient-Rich Diets, nor to Overall Food Consumption in Smallholder Farm Households. Or maybe not.
- Potato Germplasm Enhancement Enters the Genomics Era. About time? Or jumping the gun?
Nibbles: Agricultural transition, Cassava beer, Lost Feast, African seeds, Plants course, Bitters, Rangeland management, Prize
- Rubber brings rage in India.
- Cassava brings beer in Brazil.
- Book on how foods go extinct.
- The Economist discovers good seeds.
- Why Study Plants? See above.
- The biodiverse botany of bitters.
- Rangeland management in the Great Plains: a timeline.
- I know, what we need is a Food System Vision Prize.
Brainfood: Rice roots, Avocado genome, Sicilian greens, Mexican & Colombian cacao, US diversity, Cassava photosynthesis, Intense dairy, Bourbon, Grape rootstocks, Heirlooms, Ancient pastoralism, Onion polyploidy, Toxic compounds, Technology adoption
- Root anatomical traits of wild-rices reveal links between flooded rice and dryland sorghum. Mine the rice G genome for sorghum-like root traits.
- The avocado genome informs deep angiosperm phylogeny, highlights introgressive hybridization, and reveals pathogen-influenced gene space adaptation. 2 polyploidy events in its evolution; the Hass is Guatemalan introgressed into Mexican material, recently.
- Wild leafy plants market survey in Sicily: From local culture to food sustainability. You can cultivate and market them, but people do like collecting them from the wild themselves.
- A History of Cacao in West Mexico: Implications for Mesoamerica and U.S. Southwest Connections. Associated with the cult of the sun deity Xochipilli.
- Cacao breeding in Colombia, past, present and future. Breeders only recently turned to local material, and are now reaping the whirlwind. No word of the involvement of deities.
- The impact of agricultural landscape diversification on U.S. crop production. Maize and wheat yields increase with the number of agricultural land use categories in a region.
- Protein Cross-Interactions for Efficient Photosynthesis in the Cassava Cultivar SC205 Relative to Its Wild Species. Domesticated cassava is more C4 than its wild relatives.
- Routes to achieving sustainable intensification in simulated dairy farms: The importance of production efficiency and complimentary land uses. Not for the first time, crop-level diversity provides the win-win.
- Assessing the impact of corn variety and Texas terroir on flavor and alcohol yield in new-make bourbon whiskey. It’s the benzaldehyde.
- Genetic diversity and parentage analysis of grape rootstocks. 39% of the genetic background of 26 rootstocks derived from 3 accessions, admittedly of 3 different species.
- Pursuing the Potential of Heirloom Cultivars to Improve Adaptation, Nutritional, and Culinary Features of Food Crops. Look beyond yield.
- The Rise of Pastoralism in the Ancient Near East. Couldn’t have done so without sedentary communities.
- Polyploidy promotes species diversification of Allium through ecological shifts. Largely edaphic shifts, in fact.
- Assessing Specialized Metabolite Diversity in the Cosmopolitan Plant Genus Euphorbia L. Toxic diterpenoids are more structurally diverse where pressure from herbivores is strongest.
- Rethinking technological change in smallholder agriculture. Not so much adoption as propositions, encounters, dispositions and responses.
Brainfood: Clean vines, Wild maize diversity, Heirloom beans, Domestication, Cryptic variation, African rice evaluation, Fall armyworm, Food prices, Human pathogens, Farm biodiversity, Microbiome, Infographics, Tea diversity, Mekong dietary diversity, Women & NUS
- Efficiency of insect‐proof net tunnels in reducing virus‐related seed degeneration in sweet potato. “Seed” meaning vines. And yes, those tunnels work.
- Divergence with gene flow is driven by local adaptation to temperature and soil phosphorus concentration in teosinte subspecies (Zea mays parviglumis and Zea mays mexicana). Genetic differences between the two subspecies is maintained by adaptive divergence despite gene flow.
- Agronomic Performance and Nitrogen Fixation of Heirloom and Conventional Dry Bean Varieties Under Low-Nitrogen Field Conditions. Not much difference, which is actually interesting.
- Evolutionary Insights into the Nature of Plant Domestication. It’s a long process, in which natural selection and interspecific hybridization play an important part, involving many of the same genes across species.
- Cryptic genetic variation accelerates evolution by opening access to diverse adaptive peaks. Add to the above? Ah no, only in bacteria so far.
- Screening African rice (Oryza glaberrima) for tolerance to abiotic stresses: III Flooding. From a collection of >2,000 to 11 better than Asian rice. You’re wondering about I and II, aren’t you?
- Understanding the factors influencing fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda J.E. Smith) damage in African smallholder maize fields and quantifying its impact on yield. A case study in Eastern Zimbabwe. Differences among maize varieties, but weeding, tillage and intercropping also have an effect. Have yield losses been overestimated, though? Maybe.
- Natural selection contributed to immunological differences between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. But the evidence seems to be that the pathogen burden was higher for the hunter-gatherers, which goes counter to everything we’ve been taught by Jared Diamond.
- Increasing crop heterogeneity enhances multitrophic diversity across agricultural regions. More crops means more biodiversity in general.
- More Than the Sum of Its Parts: Microbiome Biodiversity as a Driver of Plant Growth and Soil Health. More microbes mean better plant growth.
- Science–graphic art partnerships to increase research impact. Free your inner artist.
- Genetic diversity, linkage disequilibrium, and population structure analysis of the tea plant (Camellia sinensis) from an origin center, Guizhou plateau, using genome-wide SNPs developed by genotyping-by-sequencing. Four groups: pure wild type, admixed wild type, ancient landraces and modern landraces.
- The Relative Caloric Prices of Healthy and Unhealthy Foods Differ Systematically across Income Levels and Continents. …and at least partially explain differences in undernutrition and overweight in adults. Here’s the infographic.
- Household-level drivers of dietary diversity in transitioning agricultural systems: Evidence from the Greater Mekong Subregion. It’s complicated and context-specific, but dietary diversity seems to generally increase with agricultural “development,” i.e. market orientation, specialisation, and intensification. Somewhat surprising? I’ve lost track, frankly.
- Potential role of neglected and underutilized plant species in improving women’s empowerment and nutrition in areas of sub-Saharan Africa. So is increasing cultivation of orphan crops a driver or a consequence of agricultural development? See what I mean? Anyway, useful review.