- The future of food is different plants. Can live with that.
- Like wapato?
- As long as coffee is still in the mix.
- That mean we won’t need forages? Surely not.
- Maybe we can also grow the same plants, but better.
Brainfood: Stressful crops, Quinoa, Ganja genome, Medicinal vetch, CWR in PAs, CWR in Zambian farms, African viral chickens, Naked barley, Farmer trials, Cotton genomes, Tuscan toms, Land sharing, Nigerian goats, Walnut diversity, Bean breeders, Sweet rice
- Developing naturally stress-resistant crops for a sustainable agriculture. Can’t help thinking there will be a trade-off.
- Quinoa Abiotic Stress Responses: A Review. Case in point?
- A physical and genetic map of Cannabis sativa identifies extensive rearrangement at the 2 THC/CBD acid synthase locus. At last, the prospect of better weed.
- In vitro anthelmintic effect of Vicia pannonica var. purpurascens on trichostrongylosis in sheep. From Turkish folk medicine to the big time?
- Should plant breeders be denied of genetic resources from protected areas? Not if you put it that way. Maybe they should be valued? There’s a way to do that…
- Estimating in situ conservation costs of Zambian crop wild relatives under alternative conservation goals. Put it out to tender.
- The genetic diversity of local african chickens: A potential for selection of chickens resistant to viral infections. No word on their monetary value, though.
- Agro-morphological diversity of Nepalese naked barley landraces. Lots of diversity, little used as yet by breeders.
- Generating Farm-Validated Variety Recommendations for Climate Adaptation. One word: tricot.
- Reference genome sequences of two cultivated allotetraploid cottons, Gossypium hirsutum and Gossypium barbadense. 13 QTLs for better fibre quality.
- Ancient Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) Varieties of Tuscany Have High Contents of Bioactive Compounds. Better than commercial varieties, apparently.
- Biodiversity and yield under different land-use types in orchard/vineyard landscapes: A meta-analysis. Land sharing works.
- Small Ruminants as a Source of Financial Security Among Women in Rural Southwest Nigeria. Better with education, extension and cooperation.
- Analysis of genetic diversity and structure in a worldwide walnut (Juglans regia L.) germplasm using SSR markers. W Europe/N America vs E Europe/Asia.
- David Bond and Jean Picard: Two pivotal breeders of faba bean in the 20th century. Bond and Picard?
- Status and factors influencing on-farm conservation of Kam Sweet Rice (Oryza sativa L.) genetic resources in southeast Guizhou Province, China. In the end of women and the old.
Brainfood: Conservation indicator, Asian diversity, Sorghum QTLs, Wheat & barley evolution, Nematode detection, Gut microbiome, IBPGR base collection, Speed breeding, Pigeonpeas double, Dingo genetics, Wild tea, Yam anthracnose, Global land use change, Tree breeding double
- Comprehensiveness of conservation of useful wild plants: An operational indicator for biodiversity and sustainable development targets. Lots to do. Lots.
- The East Asiatic region of crop plant diversity. Southwest China especially rich, with its 44 species of kiwifruit, for example.
- The Sorghum QTL Atlas: a powerful tool for trait dissection, comparative genomics and crop improvement. Maybe this will get the stuff used a bit more.
- Domestication and crop evolution of wheat and barley: Genes, genomics, and future directions. Much progress recently, but high-resolution identification of crop-wild introgressions remains a gap.
- Real-time PCR, a great tool for fast identification, sensitive detection and quantification of important plant-parasitic nematodes. Results in 3 hours.
- Gut microbiome transition across a lifestyle gradient in Himalaya. Composition (but not diversity) can change in a generation when foragers transition to agriculture.
- Are the old International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR) base collections available through the Plant Treaty’s multilateral system of access and benefit sharing? A review. Well, about 80% of them may be.
- Speed breeding in growth chambers and glasshouses for crop breeding and model plant research. Hacking the breeders’ equation: one giant leap…
- The drivers and methodologies for exploiting wild Cajanus genome in pigeonpea breeding. Sources of high protein, CMS, self-pollination, and resistances to various biotic stresses; but may need to rethink the secondary genepool.
- Development and Application of High-Density Axiom Cajanus SNP Array with 56K SNPs to Understand the Genome Architecture of Released Cultivars and Founder Genotypes. Top 6 founders accounted for 50% of the genetic base of released cultivars. Could use more of the above, in other words.
- Genomic analysis of dingoes identifies genomic regions under reversible selection during domestication and feralization. They’re reverting to wolves, genetically speaking.
- Hongyacha, a Naturally Caffeine-Free Tea Plant from Fujian, China. Well, wild tea relative anyway.
- An EST-SSR based genetic linkage map and identification of QTLs for anthracnose disease resistance in water yam (Dioscorea alata L.). One QTL looks promising.
- Global assessment and mapping of changes in mesoscale landscapes: 1992–2015. Main changes were forest→agriculture, followed by agriculture→forest.
- Quantitative Genetics and Genomics Converge to Accelerate Forest Tree Breeding. Great potential, on the brink, just around the corner…
- Genome Editing in Trees: From Multiple Repair Pathways to Long-Term Stability. Great potential, on the brink, just around the corner…
Nibbles: Land use change, Herbarium data, Crop substitution, Agroforestry in PNG, Eat This Pickle
- That global land use change map put to good polemical use.
- Herbaria put to use.
- Let them grow coca.
- Well, it is sort of agroforestry, right?
- Jeremy gets into a slight pickle.
Brainfood: Global taro, Gender gap, Eschatology, Cacao domestication double, Soybean epigenetics, Rice domestication, Domestication space, Botanic gardens, Agrarian care, Open seeds, Sustainable nutrition, Broadbean breeding, Resistant beans, Yam environments, Trade networks
- Conserving and Sharing Taro Genetic Resources for the Benefit of Global Taro Cultivation: A Core Contribution of the Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees. The first line of defence against Taro Leaf Blight, among other things.
- Female access to fertile land and other inputs in Zambia: why women get lower yields. Because they’re stuck with the poorer soils. I’m assuming there was some control for maize variety, but the damn thing is behind a paywall. LATER: Yeah, they controlled for hybrid vs open pollinated variety.
- Towards a dialogue of sustainable agriculture and end-times theology in the United States: insights from the historical ecology of nineteenth century millennial communes. In other news, it has become necessary to reconcile the apocalypse with sustainability.
- Population genomic analyses of the chocolate tree, Theobroma cacao L., provide insights into its domestication process. Domestication was both good and bad.
- The use and domestication of Theobroma cacao during the mid-Holocene in the upper Amazon. Archaeology says domestication in western Amazon in line with above (somewhere in Ecuador?), but earlier than thought.
- DNA methylation footprints during soybean domestication and improvement. Differentially methylated regions are particularly genetically diverse.
- Major domestication-related phenotypes in indica rice are due to loss of miRNA-mediated laccase silencing. Not so much the genes, as their regulation.
- Phylogenetic patterns and phenotypic profiles of the species of plants and mammals farmed for food. Plants and animals are different.
- Botanic Gardens Complement Agricultural Gene Bank in Collecting and Conserving Plant Genetic Diversity. 6000 taxa in 68 crop genera are in botanic gardens. Check out the rest of the special edition of Biopreservation and Biobanking on agricultural genebanks.
- Plants: Crop diversity pre‐breeding technologies as agrarian care co‐opted? Pre-breeding ignores farmers’ knowledge.
- The Open Source Seed Licence: A novel approach to safeguarding access to plant germplasm. Seeds will find a way.
- When too much isn’t enough: Does current food production meet global nutritional needs? No: grow more food and vegetables.
- Breeding and genomics status in faba bean (Vicia faba). Plenty of diversity to be still used. Pass the chianti.
- QTL Mapping of Resistance to Bean Weevil in Common Bean. Based on a cross between the susceptible Zambian landrace Solwezi and the resistant breeding line AO-1012-29-3-3A. But which Solwezi? I hope there’s a DOI in the actual paper for those who get through the paywall.
- Spatial Multivariate Cluster Analysis for Defining Target Population of Environments in West Africa for Yam Breeding. 7 mega-environments identified, but what I want to know is if any are under-represented in terms of material in the genebank.
- Economic shifts in agricultural production and trade due to climate change. Under mitigation scenarios trade networks for agricultural commodities get more distributed, and possibly therefore more stable. So that’s another reason to mitigate C emissions, you know, apart from saving the planet.