- Irish Times does seed saving, well.
- Australia too considers genebanks. In depth.
- “[T]he largest private collection of wild trees in Britain.” All grown from seed.
- James and the Giant Corn gives you the straight dope on the wheat genome … so we don’t have to. Thanks.
- Swiddeners can help with reforestation?
- KIT tells us all about how to make spices sustainable.
Nibbles: Biotech to the rescue, Chinese horses, Soybean carotenoids, CropMobs, Nutrition, Coffee pests, Varroa, Berries, NUS
- Genejockeys say they have sorted that global food supply problem everybody’s been so antsy about lately. No, wait, maybe it’s this.
- China has 23 indigenous horse breeds. At least.
- Latest crop to get the orange treatment is soybean.
- Diverse ways of doing agriculture: Could CropMobs go global?
- Choose foods, not nutrients. Heck, yes.
- Globally warmed beetles threatening your coffee crops? Bring on biodiversity!
- Brit breeds bees for better grooming.
- How to get the most out of your wild blueberries. Maybe we should tell Medvedev?
- Emerging Crops is a new NUS project, and it has a website.
Fruit diversity in SE Europe
Fuad Gasi tells us about an interesting effort to document the diversity of fruits in the former Yugoslavia.
A new regional collaboration between the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences, University of Sarajevo and the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Zagreb has been established in the field of fruit (including Vitis) genetic resources. This collaboration is being strengthened through the SEEDNet project (South East European Network on Plant Genetic Resources) financed by SIDA (Swedish International Development Agency). So far, we have had a publication on apple genetic resources in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a result of this collaboration. We are currently preparing a similar publication on plum genetic resources that will present results of a study made on autochthonous plums from B&H, Croatia and Serbia, focusing mainly on different synonyms of Pozegaca, but not exclusively (molecular and morphological data, as well as some food processing qualities). Similar work has been done on the chestnut and is currently being done on the pear.
Dog diversity decoded
Look at the extraordinary photos by Tim Flach in the slide gallery here. ((From which I took the Puli photo.)) Then read this account of a new paper that examines relatively simple genetic diversity that underlies the extraordinary morphological diversity of dogs. Or do it the other way. Then marvel.
Nibbles: Vancouver Island, Organic breeding, Evolution, Roots, Coffee, ABS, Donkey domestication, Domestication, Yam
- Nancy Turner, great food anthropologist, deconstructs dinner on air.
- Breeding for resilience: a strategy for organic and low-input farming systems? Eucarpia conference in Paris in December. Love the ?
- Ford Denison on evolution in reverse: crops that become weeds.
- Nature on evolution in forward: crop breeders look at roots.
- “Shade-coffee farms support native bees that maintain genetic diversity in tropical forests.” Good to know.
- Want to know about Access & Benefit Sharing negotiations? We thought so.
- Ancient people moved their asses.
- Selection during domestication differs from selection during diversification. For the ass too?
- Expect to see Dioscorea hispida appear in spam emails very soon.
- And today’s answer to malnutrition is a blue-grin alga from Lake Chad. Kidding apart, it’s an interesting story.