- 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.
Good news for wheat
Two studies out in the past week in Science are going to help wheat breeders fight diseases. One identified a DNA sequence — for a product known as the Lr34 transporter protein — which seems to confer protection against no fewer than three fungal diseases. And another study showed that a (different) DNA segment (called Yr36), which had previously been introgressed into durum wheat from wild emmer, also conferred rust resistance in the field (via). Gene discovery strikes again.
Nibbles: Hell, Honours, Pollution, Darwin, Genomes, Small companies, Tigernuts, Urine soft drink, Medicinal plants
- A way out of hell: workshop on Database Challenges in Biodiversity Informatics
- Potato man honoured.
- Farm diversity reduces nitrogen runoff.
- Darwin on the Farm, from our friends at the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
- Yeast and wheat genome sequencing going gangbusters.
- Coffee!
- Fermented tigernuts more nutritious? No, they’re not from an endangered species. Via.
- Cow water!
- Lots of medicinal plants conservation projects going on in India.