- Wild camel genetically distinct from the domesticated kind. Well I never.
- Maya tapped into their “sacred groves” to build temples, which did not end well.
- Boffins extract DNA from ancient barley in Upper Egypt, find it was 2-rowed, but derived from a 6-rowed ancestor. No word on whether it was used to make beer, but my guess is yes.
- Large Y chromosome microsatellite study of Eurasian cattle does “not support the recent hypothesis on the origin of Y1 from the local European hybridization of cattle with male aurochsen.” This could run and run.
- I like this idea: a garden of poisons.
- Agroforestry’s coming-of-age party coming up. You going? Let us know.
- Multiple explanations for lactase persistence.
Nibbles: India, City chicks, Rooftop gardens, Black cherry, Prairie grasses, Oryza SNP
- ICRISAT recommends diversity to cope with climate change in India.
- US urban farmers “mad as wet hens“. City chicks?
- US urban farmers with a view to die for.
- CWR becomes nuisance when free of soil pathogen.
- Convicts help with germplasm regeneration and multiplication.
- The “gold-standard set of curated polymorphisms” for rice.
Livestock genetics symposium online
DAD-Net informs us that the presentations given at the symposium on Statistical Genetics of Livestock for the Post-Genomic Era, held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, on May 4-6, 2009, are now available online in the form of both PDFs and videos. Quite a resource.
Natural selection at work
“This new forage has great insect resistance”, effused a former colleague, “we just need to eliminate the toxins that keep sheep from eating it.”
Genetically engineered drought-tolerant crops are introduced with great fanfare, only to disappear when they turn out to have low yield under nondrought conditions.
Fascinating post from R. Ford Denison, about how silly old natural selection (apparently) fails to make simple changes that would “obviously” be good for the organism concerned. Denison is very clear, in this post and elsewhere on his blog, about just how hard it is for even clever people to improve on the countless experiments that natural selection has had to work on, especially in agriculture. That’s why I for one am not holding my breath waiting for anyone anywhere to transform a C3 plant into a C4 plant.
Nibbles: Agroforestry, Forecasts, Coffee, Pigs, GIS, Potatoes
- North American Agroforestry; new edition of an old book.
- “Supply will go up, demand will go up, and real prices of grain and oilseeds also will go up” over next 10 years. That’s nice.
- Nescafe coffee goes green in Philippines.
- Rare-breed jamon at $490 a leg. Not so marginal any more.
- Visualizing Tweeter biodiversity observations. Over to you, Luigi.
- Ireland hosts International Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium meeting. Well, obviously.