- Against the grain? A historical institutional analysis of access governance of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture in Ethiopia. Culture, economics and politics.
- Early Pastoral Economies and Herding Transitions in Eastern Eurasia. Everything changed around 1200 BC. Starting in Mongolia.
- Genetic diversity within and between British and Irish breeds: The maternal and paternal history of native ponies. Diversity within breeds being maintained, global haplotypes well represented, but a couple of breeds pretty unique. Long way from Mongolia.
- Diversity buffers winegrowing regions from climate change losses. Gotta change your cultivars.
- Contribution de la biodiversité à l’éco-oenotourisme des vignobles héroïques: atouts et perspectives. You can’t change your cultivars.
- Marker-assisted selection in a global barley (Hordeum vulgare subsp. vulgare) collection revealed a unique genetic determinant of the naked barley controlled by the nud locus. One genetic variant, from East Asia, makes barley naked.
- Morphological diversity within a core collection of subterranean clover (Trifolium subterraneum L.): Lessons in pasture adaptation from the wild. The Australian cultivars have similar morphological diversity to the core collection, and several morphological characters are probably adaptive.
- Genome-wide genetic diversity is maintained through decades of soybean breeding in Canada. After an initial decline, though, and there’s more out there.
- Evaluation of genetic diversity, agronomic traits, and anthracnose resistance in the NPGS Sudan Sorghum Core collection. 10% country subset of a 10% core subset of >40,000 accessions contains multiple anthracnose resistance sources, and lots of other diversity.
- Phylogeny and conservation priority assessment of Asian domestic chicken genetic resources. 7 clades, 3 centres of origin, northern Yunnan the highest priority for conservation.
- European and Asian contribution to the genetic diversity of mainland South American chickens. Alas, no evidence of a pre-Columbian Polynesian contribution. Yunnan, that’s another story.
- Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi affect the concentration and distribution of nutrients in the grain differently in barley compared with wheat. Differently as in opposite directions.
- Molecular and Morphological Divergence of Australian Wild Rice. Including a putative new taxon.
Nibbles: Costs edition
- What should food cost? Enough to support genebanks and breeding, natch.
- What would sustainable coffee cost? Including genebanks and breeding, I hope.
- And sustainable bananas? Including genebanks and breeding, of course.
Nibbles: CWR book, Seed pix, Distilling, Sorghum, Posters, Self-sufficiency
- E-book on using crop wild relatives in breeding.
- The aesthetics of conserving seeds.
- The best corn for whiskey.
- Going back to sorghum in Kenya.
- Another take on how to make a cool scientific poster.
- One way to crunch the numbers on eating local.
Nibbles: Risks & solutions edition
- 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: Bean diversity treble, Edited tomatoes, Breeding strategies, Pseudocereals, American lost crops, Genotyping collections, Apple diversity, Rice domestication, Cotton domestication, Wheat & gluten, Rubus phylogeny, Cassava brown streak, Prices & migration, Edible caterpillars
- Resequencing of 683 common bean genotypes identifies yield component trait associations across a north–south cline. There’s a fairly straightforward way to select for larger beans as a key component of yield.
- Is the USDA core collection of common bean representative of genetic diversity of the species, as assessed by SNP diversity? Not as much as it could be.
- Diversity, use and production of farmers’ varieties of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L., Fabaceae) in southwestern and northeastern Ethiopia. There are more varieties per household in places where the overall number of varieties per community was lower.
- Rapid customization of Solanaceae fruit crops for urban agriculture. Gene editing for shorter tomatoes.
- The home field advantage of modern plant breeding. Public breeding programs should go for specialist varieties that perform reliably in narrow environments.
- Thinking Outside of the Cereal Box: Breeding Underutilized (Pseudo)Cereals for Improved Human Nutrition. The next quinoa awaits its 15 minutes.
- Experimental Cultivation of Eastern North America’s Lost Crops: Insights into Agricultural Practice and Yield Potential. There’s life in the old crops yet. And that’s before gene editing.
- Time for a paradigm shift in the use of plant genetic resources. Genotype everything.
- Using whole-genome SNP data to reconstruct a large multi-generation pedigree in apple germplasm. 3 early modern cultivars had a disproportionate impact on modern apples.
- Machine Learning Reveals Spatiotemporal Genome Evolution in Asian Rice Domestication. The indica and japonica sub-species have exchanged a lot of genetic material at different times, and you get different answers to the question of domestication depending on which bits you look at.
- Genetic Analysis of the Transition from Wild to Domesticated Cotton (G. hirsutum L.). There are fibre quality genes in the subgenome from the parent with unspinnable fibre. Go figure.
- A Comparative Study of Modern and Heirloom Wheat on Indicators of Gastrointestinal Health. Not much difference.
- Target Capture Sequencing Unravels Rubus Evolution. The taxonomy needs work. You don’t say.
- Expansion of the cassava brown streak pandemic in Uganda revealed by annual field survey data for 2004 to 2017. The history of a disease outbreak in excruciating detail.
- Crop prices and the individual decision to migrate. Decrease in the price of coffee in Vietnam (but not rice, which is mainly used for household consumption rather than export) resulted in increased chance of migration, but only for individuals of lower education.
- The contribution of ‘chitoumou’, the edible caterpillar Cirina butyrospermi, to the food security of smallholder farmers in southwestern Burkina Faso. It’s significant, but only during the caterpillar season. I guess they don’t keep. I spot an opportunity. Yeah, you guessed it, gene editing.