- Pinning down transposable elements across the whole maize genome.
- Wine and weed in Lebanon. Not as mellow as it sounds.
- Yields and Land Use in Agriculture: The Website.
- The effect of all those yields times 12,000 years on C sequestration is about as much as that of deforestation.
- Ancient Roman 1% responsible for introducing the citron and lemon to the Mediterranean.
- Flowering duration and pod numbers are they keys to heat tolerance in peas.
- 94% of US dairy cows are Holsteins. How boring is that?
Nibbles: Genomic taxonomy, AI taxonomy, Apple history, Polo on sago, Quinoa cooking, Super-crap, Funding conservation, Coffee conservation
- Boffins sequence plant in field for real-time identification.
- Boffins decide machines do identification better.
- Boffins trace apple domestication to Silk Road.
- Famous Silk Road traveller on sago.
- Thinking up fun ways of cooking another pretty tasteless staple.
- Did someone mention super-foodszzzzzzz.
- Mongabay: Africa needs creative conservation funding approaches.
- Emily Garthwaite: Hold my latte.
Brainfood: Sustainability index, Beet wild relative, Participatory goats, Sarma, Wild wheat & drought, Ahipa conservation, Saving genebanks, Chinese cattle, Bolivia & CC, Seed systems, Cereal residues
- Sustainability assessment of agricultural systems: The validity of expert opinion and robustness of a multi-criteria analysis. Experts know their stuff.
- Genetic diversity of Patellifolia patellaris from the Iberian Peninsula, a crop wild relative of cultivated beets. 271 individuals, 10 sites, maybe 3 genetic groupings?
- Production system and participatory identification of breeding objective traits for indigenous goat breeds of Uganda. Resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses are the priority.
- Plant diversity for sarma in Turkey: nature, garden and traditional cuisine in the modernity. 73, including 3 endemics.
- Identification of ecogeographical gaps in the Spanish Aegilops collections with potential tolerance to drought and salinity. Evaluation avant la lettre.
- Trends and drivers of on-farm conservation of the root legume ahipa (Pachyrhizus ahipa) in Bolivia over the period 1994/96–2012. Price is too low.
- The Vulnerability of Plant Genetic Resources Conserved Ex Situ. The problem: “…genebanks around the world are generally under stress, largely from inadequate public investment, weakened political support, and insufficient stakeholder engagement.” The solution: privatization, commodification, consolidation, prioritization, communication.
- Species composition and environmental adaptation of indigenous Chinese cattle. Taurine-indicine cline N-S, with traces of banteng, gayal and yak.
- Climate change and crop diversity: farmers’ perceptions and adaptation on the Bolivian Altiplano. Maintaining multiple varieties still done, despite not seen as climate adaptation.
- A Risk Assessment Framework for Seed Degeneration: Informing an Integrated Seed Health Strategy for Vegetatively Propagated Crops. Actually not seed, but rather what to do about pathogen build-up in vegetative planting material. Turns out farmers can be quite good at producing clean material if they can choose healthy plants.
- New criteria for the molecular identification of cereal grains associated with archaeological artefacts. Alkylresorcinols, basically.
Brainfood: African tea, Iranian olives, Persistent identifiers, Fast breeding, Lablab domestication, Pea origin, Celebs & conservation, Ancient dope, Sugarcane evolution, Chicken selection
- Multiple origins and a narrow genepool characterise the African tea germplasm: concordant patterns revealed by nuclear and plastid DNA markers. It’s a “potpourri,” but kinda missing Chinese Assam stuff.
- The eastern part of the Fertile Crescent concealed an unexpected route of olive (Olea europaea L.) differentiation. It was in Iran before domestication.
- Identifiers for the 21st century: How to design, provision, and reuse persistent identifiers to maximize utility and impact of life science data. Why DOIs succeeded, and why something like them needs to be applied to biological specimens, including genebank accessions, to combat “desultory citation practices”. But we knew that.
- Speed breeding: a powerful tool to accelerate crop research and breeding. Can double the number of generations per unit time with fully-enclosed controlled-environment growth chambers.
- Evidence for two domestication events of hyacinth bean (Lablab purpureus (L.) Sweet): a comparative analysis of population genetic data. With the 2-seeded group domesticated in Ethiopia, the 4-seeded somewhere else in Africa.
- Refinement of the collection of wild peas (Pisum L.) and search for the area of pea domestication with a deletion in the plastidic psbA-trnH spacer. Maybe not Turkey.
- The effectiveness of celebrities in conservation marketing. Use carefully, and evaluate.
- Cannabis in Eurasia: origin of human use and Bronze Age trans-continental connections. Proto-Indo-Europeans were real stoners.
- Analysis of Three Sugarcane Homo/Homeologous Regions Suggests Independent Polyploidization Events of Saccharum officinarum and Saccharum spontaneum. It’s really complicated, not least because of plant breeders.
- Genomic Comparison of Indigenous African and Northern European Chickens Reveals Putative Mechanisms of Stress Tolerance Related to Environmental Selection Pressure. African chickens able to withstand high temperatures due to a region on chromosome 27 and European chickens low temperatures due to region on chromosome 2.
Nibbles: Dwarf rice, Ricestoration, Tarostoration, Biorepositories, Sustainable coffee, Cactus wars, Goaty portraits, Spandrels, Potato genebank, Forests and nutrition
- The long and short of Green Revolution rice.
- Restoring historical slave-worked rice fields in North Carolina.
- Kinda similar, but taro in Hawaii.
- There’s a bank for milk diversity.
- Nice review of sustainable coffee production.
- Opuntia: tasty but deadly (to some).
- Handsome goat pix.
- Festoons of fruits at the Farnesina: Jeremy is incensed.
- Great new webpages for the CIP genebank.
- Another report on a report that living close to forests is good for nutritional security, up to a point. But bushmeat?