- A North Macedonian professor’s 15-year rescue mission for landraces and crops surviving only in remote villages. Why bother? Stay tuned…
- Ancient grapevines in Tigray represent a unique genetic lineage with potential value for breeding varieties adapted to dryland conditions.
- Hawai’i Public Radio checks in on Maui’s coconut genebank. Useful to breed varieties adapted to really wet conditions, presumably.
- The Cayman Islands are also hoarding coconuts, along with lots of tasty fruits.
- A USD 400,000 boost from Taiwan for the Eswatini national genebank. Indigenous vegetables get much-needed love.
- A regional survey of 25 orphan crops across 13 Latin American countries finds quinoa and amaranth well-catalogued, but characterization budgets are the real bottleneck. Collecting and conserving in genebanks is great, but not enough.
- South Korea puts 330,000 seed accessions under “double lock”, hedging against both climate change and war. Conserving in one place is not enough.
- FAO warns that nearly a third of the world can’t afford the USD 4.28 a day that a healthy diet costs — nearly three billion people, and rising. That’s why we need al the above, I guess.
Brainfood: Easter Island coffee, Sword bean, Sweetpotato names, Colombian potatoes, Nut grass, Market access, Pollinators, Seed microorganisms
- An insular in situ Coffea arabica resource from Rapa Nui (Easter Island): SSR uniformity and biochemical evaluation of material consistent with the Typica lineage. Coffee growing on remote Rapa Nui appears to represent a remarkably uniform population closely related to the historic Typica lineage. Not diverse doesn’t necessarily mean not interesting.
- Farmer knowledge, management practices, and seed morphological diversity of sword bean (Canavalia gladiata) in Côte d’Ivoire. Growers recognize, manage and maintain morphological variation in sword bean, a legume that could be more utilized.
- Consistency of farmer-named sweet potato cultivars and their physicochemical and color differentiation within a production region. While local naming systems are generally meaningful, they don’t always map perfectly onto measurable physicochemical and colour traits.
- Harnessing the Genetic Diversity of the Colombian Central Collection of Potatoes to Dissect Pigmentation Genomics in Andigenum Landraces. Colombia’s collection helps explain colourful potatoes.
- Novel food ingredients from Cyperus rotundus: an ancient famine food and the world’s most pernicious weed comes back to the table. One of the world’s most notorious weeds may also be an overlooked food crop, and a potential source of novel food ingredients. An opportunity weed?
- Market remoteness and the production–diet association in smallholder food systems: Evidence from rural Nepal. Growing a diverse range of crops does not always translate into a more diverse diet. In Nepal, the relationship depends strongly on market access, highlighting the importance of infrastructure alongside agricultural diversification. Ok, forget the nut grass then, at least far from markets.
- Pollinators support the nutrition and income of vulnerable communities. Pollinator diversity makes important contributions to both dietary quality and household incomes among vulnerable communities.
- Seed ageing increases the influence of native microorganisms on germination. As seeds deteriorate, their naturally associated microorganisms play an increasingly important role in determining whether they successfully germinate. Of course microorganism diversity had to get a look-in too.
Character study
Do you work in a national genebanks? If so, you might want to take a survey on your “molecular characterisation capacity, infrastructure, policy environment, and interest in future DSI collaboration with CGIAR.”
Brainfood: Diversity of Oats, Cotton, Sugarcane, Rice, Amaranthus, Vegetables, Agroforestry, Value chains
- Genome-wide comparative diversity uncovers population structure, global distribution, and targets of selection in hexaploid oat. A worldwide survey reveals how oat diversity is structured, spread, and shaped by breeding, helping pinpoint untapped genetic resources for future improvement.
- Genomic diversity and the domestication history of cotton (Gossypium hirsutum). Its genome traces cotton’s journey from its wild origins in Mesoamerica while documenting the genetic narrowing that accompanied domestication.
- Genetic architecture of sugarcane traits in a polyploid genomics framework. New genomic tools finally begin to untangle the diversity of one of agriculture’s most genetically complex crops, exposing the basis of traits breeders have long selected largely in the dark.
- Projected warming will exceed the long-term thermal limits of rice cultivation. Rice has historically thrived within remarkably stable climatic boundaries. Those boundaries are now on course to be crossed across major growing regions, with profound implications for global food security. Diversity to the rescue?
- An inter-specific Amaranthus pangenome captures genetic variation potentially underlying key leafy vegetable traits in this underutilised crop. A rich reservoir of previously hidden diversity emerges from across multiple cultivated amaranths, offering breeders new options for improving a neglected but nutritious vegetable.
- Impact of gardening and nutrition support provided to women in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Even in one of the world’s most challenging humanitarian settings, greater interspecific crop diversity translated into better diets, improved food security, and enhanced wellbeing.
- Designing perennial crop-based agroforestry systems: specificities, challenges, and opportunities. Diversification does not stop at the field edge: how perennial crops can be combined with trees to deliver productive, resilient, and biodiversity-friendly farming systems.
- Towards Nature Positive supply chains: From biodiversity commitments to organisational action. What would it take to move biodiversity from corporate promises to business practice? Maybe the above examples can help turn aspiration into measurable action.
Brainfood: Indigenous edition
- Rapid adaptive increase of amylase gene copy number in Indigenous Andeans. Indigenous Andean populations evolved exceptionally high copy numbers of the AMY1 salivary amylase gene, likely linked to long-term adaptation to starch-rich diets associated with potato domestication roughly 10,000 years ago.
- Horse genetics, archaeology, and the beginning of riding. Horse domestication was not a sudden genetic event beginning around 2200–2100 BCE, but a long and regionally varied process in which Indigenous Eurasian pastoralists progressively managed, rode, milked and selectively bred multiple horse lineages over many centuries, transforming mobility and social organization well before the rise of the dominant modern domestic horse lineage.
- Bridging biodiversity and food systems: A nationwide synthesis of non-conventional food plants (PANCs) in Brazil. Brazil’s non-conventional food plants (PANCs) and associated Indigenous and traditional knowledge could help build more diverse, climate-resilient and socially inclusive food systems while strengthening biodiversity conservation, rural livelihoods and public food programs.
- Indigenous Wisdom for a Changing World: Bridging Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation. Sacred groves and other community-managed landscapes in central Ethiopia conserve high levels of biodiversity through Indigenous institutions, ritual practices and traditional ecological knowledge, suggesting that effective conservation depends on treating cultural stewardship systems as integral to ecological resilience rather than as secondary to scientific management.
- When Knowledge Isn’t Free: Legal and Ethical Imperatives of Protecting Indigenous Intellectual Property. There’s a persistent mismatch between Western intellectual-property regimes and Indigenous concepts of collective ownership, biocultural heritage and intergenerational custodianship of knowledge, and that’s unfair.
- Crediting and citing Indigenous Knowledges within research. Biodiversity conservation becomes more effective when Indigenous scientists and communities participate as equal partners rather than merely as local stakeholders or informants.