- Bamboo microscope used to document rice varieties at Indian village genebank. Want one.
- And more documentation and conservation of traditional knowledge in India: this time it’s medicines.
- Nigel Chaffey’s latest botanical buffet table at the Annals of Botany has stuff on nomenclature and genomes. Always worth following.
- Latest on saving agarwood. And more. Thanks to twittering by @AsiaForestry.
- Biofortified blogs research on geneflow between crops and their wild relatives.
- Kentucky bluegrass pix. Botany Photo of the Day is also worth following. You guys all use Google Reader, right?
- “Any serious discussion of biodiversity conservation must include the diversity of crops and livestock…” Right on.
- Vavilov hits Abyssinia. Another one for Reader.
- Pollinator trends in Europe and the world. It ain’t good.
- Your botanic gardens needs at least 15 individuals of that palm.
Nibbles: Genomes, Sorghum squared, Tropical forests, UG99, Vanilla, Himalayan agriculture
- And today’s 500 genomes are … h/t OpenHelix.
- FAO uses sorghum to deliver food security in Matabeleland North.
- Meanwhile … science alert: sorghum’s family tree delineated, scope for breeding from wild relatives.
- Small family farms can provide lots of food and preserve tropical forest biodiversity, say researchers. Actual paper not yet available.
- Wired magazine does UG99 wheat rust. Read it and weep.
- And in other fungus news, Fusarium hits vanilla in Kerala.
- “Ladakh’s youth … are increasingly switching from backbreaking agriculture in the harsh terrain to more profitable jobs in the booming tourism industry.” Twas ever thus.
Nibbles: Cassava, fonio, apples, Salicornia, aurochs, seeds
- Nagib Nassar challenges the wisdom of GM cassava. Cultivate indigenous and wild varieties of the crop!
- Or fonio (Digitaria exilis). New paper on its diversity.
- And for dessert? Wild apple diversity?
- Need salad? How about Salicornia then?
- Nice aurochs steak to go with the salad?
- Not too soon to start planning a future harvest, if you’re in Ireland and want seeds.
Nibbles: Haiti, Talets, Burukutu, Citrus diversity, Fish
- Rebuilding Haiti’s agriculture on the back of diverse tissue-cultured banana plantlets.
- Rhizowen’s hidden talets. And no, that’s not a misprint.
- “The age long drink, also known as BKT, serves as a source of alcohol for those who lack the financial means to patronise refined brew like beer and other foreign or imported drinks.” Count me in.
- Citrus diversity — is the genetic blueprint the only way to enjoy it?
- The collapse of wild-caught fish. In brief.
Locating agricultural origins in Mexico and Italy
I know that domestication is not an event, but a process. I know that most crops and livestock were probably domesticated more than once, in more than one area. I know all this, but I’m still a sucker for papers that come up with specific times and places for the origin of agriculture. Papers such as Daniel Zizumbo-Villarreal and Patricia Colunga-GarcíaMarín‘s in the latest GRACE:
Sympatric distribution of the putative wild ancestral populations of maize, beans and squash indicate the extreme northwest Balsas-Jalisco region as a possible locus of domestication.
The paper is a review. It synthesizes a host of paleoecological, archaeobotanical and molecular data. Meanwhile, another paper, this time in the Journal of Archaeological Science, applies matrix mathematics to a somewhat different, though related, problem: the arrival of wheat in Italy. The authors looked at a selection of old emmer landraces from all around Italy stored in the German and ICARDA genebanks. ((The question of why they did not obtain material from an Italian genebank is one that I am loath to explore, for fear of what I might find.)) They developed a matrix of genetic distances among these based on microsatellite data. They then calculated matrices of geographical distances among the landraces based on different putative places of arrival of the crop around the coast of Italy. The two matrices showed the closest correlations for arrival sites located in northern Puglia, the heel of Italy. That corresponds with where the earliest Neolithic sites are found.
Now, I wonder, when will someone apply this method to maize, beans and squash molecular data and test mathematically Zizumbo-Villarreal and Colunga-GarcíaMarín more “qualitative” inferences?