- Agricultural heritage systems and agrobiodiversity. FAO’s Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) work just fine.
- A northern Chinese origin of Austronesian agriculture: new evidence on traditional Formosan cereals. The precursors of the Austronesians took foxtail millet, broomcorn millet and rice to Taiwan from around Shandong in northeastern China in the second half of the 4th millennium BCE. That was quite a globally important agricultural heritage system (note lower case) in its day.
- Neolithic culinary traditions revealed by cereal, milk and meat lipids in pottery from Scottish crannogs. At roughly the same time as the above, farmers in Scotland were eating a gruel made of wheat and milk. Maybe not so globally important, but still.
- Epipalaeolithic animal tending to Neolithic herding at Abu Hureyra, Syria (12,800–7,800 calBP): Deciphering dung spherulites. That wheat and milk came from far away and long ago. In fact, maybe 2000 years longer ago than is usually thought.
- Tracing Maize History in Northern Iroquoia Through Radiocarbon Date Summed Probability Distributions. Maize really took off in NY/Ontario/Quebec between 1200 and 1450 AD.
- Drought-Induced Civil Conflict Among the Ancient Maya. Towards the end of the above period there was real strife in the Maya lands, but also local resilience. Makes you wonder whether whatever was happening among the Iroquois and Maya was somehow connected.
- Genomic and Morphological Differentiation of Spirit Producing Agave angustifolia Traditional Landraces Cultivated in Jalisco, Mexico. Whatever happened in Mesoamerica 600 years ago, Indigenous knowledge of agave diversity survived.
- Vernacular Names and Genetics of Cultivated Coffee (Coffea arabica) in Yemen. Indigenous knowledge of coffee diversity doesn’t correspond with genetic data in this globally significant agricultural heritage system.
- Advanced and emerging agricultural innovations for securing food, climate and ecosystems in Moroccan oasis. Even globally important agricultural heritage systems need innovation.
- Potential of breadfruit cultivation to contribute to climate-resilient low latitude food systems. Breadfruit can be important globally, not just in its current agricultural heritage system.
Nibbles: Food security, CWR, Rice, Food crisis, Yams, Peanuts, Tuscan wine, SADC seeds, Lonely trees
- Handy primer on the effects of climate change and biodiversity on food security, courtesy of the House of Lords.
- Crop wild relatives could help with all three.
- Trouble brewing for rice. House of Lords nodding wisely.
- The trouble that brewed for wheat wasn’t quite as advertised. Spoiler alert: the price spike had to do with China buying up all it could. So is rice next then?
- No trouble brewing for yams now that they’re getting sequenced.
- Nor for peanuts in the Gambia, for different reasons.
- Sounds like everything is hunky dory for the Tuscan grape too.
- Good to see SADC is on the job.
- It may be too late for some trees though.
Brainfood: Canadian berries, Durian, Watermelon domestication, Wild cacao, New Chinese fruit, Animal pollinators, Food impacts
- Berries as a case study for crop wild relative conservation, use, and public engagement in Canada. Berries could be an agrobiodiversity conservation flagship, at least in Canada. If only other types of crops, and countries, were that easy.
- The king of fruits. There’s a dark side to durian that’s thankfully not there with berries.
- Genome sequencing of up to 6,000-yr-old Citrullus seeds reveals use of a bitter-fleshed species prior to watermelon domestication. Neolithic Libyans used wild watermelons for their seeds, not flesh.
- Comparison of bioactive components and flavor volatiles of diverse cocoa genotypes of Theobroma grandiflorum, Theobroma bicolor, Theobroma subincanum and Theobroma cacao. Could use the wild relatives for tastier chocolate. Another potential flagship, surely.
- Akebia: A Potential New Fruit Crop in China. I’d totally try it. And not just because it’s called both “wild banana” and “chocolate vine.”
- Animal pollination increases stability of crop yield across spatial scales. Not just higher yields, greater yield stability too. Important for some of the above, and many other fruits.
- Estimating the environmental impacts of 57,000 food products. More nutritious foods tend to be more environmentally friendly too. But how many of these products include the above? I mean fruits, not pollinators.
Nibbles: Forgotten crops special issue, Coffee fingerprinting, Three Sisters, Food gardening, Magic mushrooming, Genebanks in Ukraine, Colombia, Australia, China
- Forthcoming special issue of Plants, People, Planet on forgotten crops. Get your paper in about how they’re under-represented in genebanks.
- Or about how they need to be DNA fingerprinted, like the USDA is doing for coffee.
- I wonder if there is a forgotten crops version of the Three Sisters. Answers on a postcard, please.
- Forget about genebanks, grow those forgotten crops in your garden. Rebelliously.
- Forget about forgotten crops, how about forgotten mushrooms?
- Lest we forget the Ukrainian genebank.
- No way to forget the Future Seeds genebank.
- Australians are not being allowed to forget about genebanks, plant and animal. With video goodness. There’s hope yet.
- Meanwhile, in China…
Brainfood: Wild scarlet runner beans, Wild coffee, Mexican vanilla, Hybrid barley, Zea genus, Wild maize gene, N-fixing xylem microbiota, Drone phenotyping, Wild tomato, Potato breeding, Wild potato, Wheat evaluation, Rice breeding returns
- The genomic signature of wild-to-crop introgression during the domestication of scarlet runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus L.). The wild Mexican genepool is helping to counteract the effects of the domestication bottleneck.
- Genetic variation in wild and cultivated Arabica coffee (Coffea arabica L.): Evolutionary origin, global distribution, and its effect on fungal disease incidence in Southwest Ethiopia. Domesticated disease-resistant cultivars are threatening the genetic integrity of the wild genepool. You win some, you lose some.
- Uncovering haplotype diversity in cultivated Mexican vanilla species. Plenty of evidence of past hybridization events in cultivated vanilla in Mexico. Maybe it can swap stories with scarlet runner bean.
- Six-rowed wild-growing barleys are hybrids of diverse origins. In the case of barley, the wild-cultivated hybrids even got a separate Latin binomial.
- Portrait of a genus: genome sequencing reveals evidence of adaptive variation in Zea. Lots of variation in interesting adaptive traits in the wild relatives of maize. Did they, or will they, make their way into the crop, I wonder?
- An adaptive teosinte mexicana introgression modulates phosphatidylcholine levels and is associated with maize flowering time. This one did.
- A highly conserved core bacterial microbiota with nitrogen-fixation capacity inhabits the xylem sap in maize plants. Its wild relatives are not the only wild organisms maize benefits from.
- Phenomic data-facilitated rust and senescence prediction in maize using machine learning algorithms. Drones and fancy maths can be used to predict and document southern rust infection in maize. Maybe in wild relatives too one day, who knows.
- A Solanum lycopersicoides reference genome facilitates insights into tomato specialized metabolism and immunity. A tomato wild relative has a gene for resistance to bacterial speck disease, so of course they had to sequence its genome.
- Genetic gains in potato breeding as measured by field testing of cultivars released during the last 200 years in the Nordic Region of Europe. Genetic gains for yield (measured in non-target environments) were not that great and contributed about half of productivity gains. Results for other traits were even worse, mainly because of stringent market demands. So no chance of using wild relatives I suppose.
- Genotypic Response and Selection of Potato Germplasm Under Heat Stress. Not so fast…
- Dataset of historic and modern bread and durum wheat cultivar performance under conventional and reduced tillage with full and reduced irrigation. I wonder to what extent wild relatives contributed to the differences.
- Assessing returns to research investments in rice varietal development: Evidence from the Philippines and Bangladesh. Net returns from collaboration in rice breeding between IRRI and national partners are still strong in the Philippines and Bangladesh, but declining, and faster in the former than the latter. Plenty of genes from wild relatives in IRRI lines of course. Maybe there could be more?