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.
Nibbles: Vegetable seeds, Colorado potato beetle, Castanea, Pigs, Condiments, Porpoise, Biofuels, Mouflon, Blackwood
- European are growing more vegetables. But how much of that is heirlooms?
- Canadian boffins grow wild potatoes for the leaves.
- Chinese wasp going to roast Italy’s chestnuts.
- The genetics of swine geography. Or is it the geography of swine genetics?
- The diversity of sauces.
- Cooking Flipper.
- Genetically engineered brewer’s yeast + cellulose-eating bacterium + biomass = methyl halides.
- Wild sheep runs wild in Cyrpus.
- “It can be planted in farms because it does not compete for resources with corn, coffee or bananas and acts as a nitrogen-fixing agent in the soil. The mpingo is also considered a good luck tree by the Chagga people who live on the slopes of the Mt. Kilimanjaro.”
Cats and dogs and maize: A Darwinian view
The Rough Guide To Evolution lists the entire content (with linky goodness) of the current early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences of the USA. As Mark Pallen notes, it “is chock full of articles on evolution from a recent colloquium”. Two that we’ll be reading over the weekend are:
- From wild animals to domestic pets, an evolutionary view of domestication, and
- Tracking footprints of maize domestication and evidence for a massive selective sweep on chromosome 10.
Who says we don’t know how to have fun round here?