- Domesticated sheep spread in two waves.
- How IITA helps yam farmers in West Africa.
- “…it is vital that we develop some sort of early warning system that will enable us to take timely action if we see part of the landscape suffering and signs of the loss of species richness.”
- First issue of newsletter on Agricultural Payments for Ecosystem Services online at Ecoagriculture Partners.
- Visit Cairo’s Agricultural Museum. If you think you can take it.
Cattle domestication
I was going to write about some recent papers on the domestication of cattle myself, but things got a bit hectic and I didn’t find time. I did, however, find Razib’s post at Gene Expression, and I commend it to you. Of course there’s a lot in there about the genes for milk production, and some worrying nonsense about using genome information to breed better cattle or, to put it another way “accelerating livestock genetic improvement for milk and meat production”. Breeders making use of super-sires and super-ovulating cows have already done a pretty good job of reducing the diversity of extant cattle, and I for one am not convinced by the need for ever more efficient use-once-then-dispose-of milk machines. But I haven’t read the papers, so I can’t comment further. I am intrigued, however, by this statement, quoted by Razib:
Domestication and artificial selection appear to have left detectable signatures of selection within the cattle genome, yet the current levels of diversity within breeds are at least as great as exists within humans.
If we’re not suffering from having passed through genetic narrows, maybe cattle aren’t either. Maybe they’re just suffering.
Nibbles: Japan, Bananas, GMO, Bees, Squirrels, Mangroves, Climate change and indigenous people, Goji, Svalbard, Heirloom rice, Dataporn
- Japan’s unemployed end up farming.
- Somewhat uninformed comments about the perfection of the banana.
- “…traditional genetic crosses outperform genetically modified crops by a wide margin.”
- Alice Waters takedown.
- Brits throw money at bees.
- Red squirrel missing link found through DNA fingerprinting. Red squirrel pie, anyone? Ok ok, make it grey.
- Mexican mangroves in trouble.
- “Indigenous Peoples have contributed the least to the global problem of climate change but will almost certainly bear the greatest brunt of its impact.”
- Go go goji.
- Secretary General of the Nordic Council of Ministers and former Icelandic Prime Minister waxes lyrical about genebanks.
- So there’s a Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. No, not Golden Rice. Via.
- Help the Biodiversity Heritage Library decide on a citation format. Or not. whatever.
How C4 came to be understood
Yesterday was Ada Lovelace day, when bloggers around the world celebrated women in technology. We weren’t aware of it, and frankly, I’m not sure who we might have chosen. Erna Bennett? Fortunately, though, we can direct you instead to Oliver Morton’s fine post on Constance Hartt. Who she?
Hartt was a laboratory researcher at the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association Experiment Station, and her assiduous work on the biochemistry of sugar cane in the 1930s and 1940s convinced her that, for that plant at least, the primary product of photosynthesis is malate, a four carbon sugar. Later carbon-14 studies showed that she was right — and led to an interesting conundrum. Why did some plants — most plants, indeed, and almost all algae — make a three carbon sugar, phophoglycerate, while sugar cane and, it later became clear, various other grasses made a four-carbon sugar?
Some gene-jockeys seem to think that all that’s needed to double the yield of crop plants is “simply” to give them a C4 photosynthetic pathway. I’m not going to get into that one. But Morton gives a good account of how and why C4 differs from C3, and the part Hartt played in its elucidation.
Nibbles: Book, Moral and physical revulsion, DNA bank, Cacao genome, Cassava, Agroforestry, Dung products, Pork brain
- “How One Man Nearly Lost his Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden.” Thanks, Danny.
- Bitter food=betrayal.
- DNA bank for Irish dairy and beef cattle being established.
- “… a document from 1631 … mentioned threats to the cacao crop.”
- USAID supports cassava farmers in Africa.
- The simpukng forest gardens of the Dayak deconstructed.
- Shit!
- 1170% of your daily cholesterol per serving. Sounds good to me.