- Towards the Understanding of Important Coconut Endosperm Phenotypes: Is there an Epigenetic Control? Maybe.
- Dogs accompanied humans during the Neolithic expansion into Europe. All part of the Fertile Crescent package.
- Genomic Insights into Date Palm Origins. Domesticated in the Gulf region, but in a more complicated way than used to be thought.
- Speed breeding orphan crops. Worth the extra cost.
- Malus sieversii: the origin, flavonoid synthesis mechanism, and breeding of red-skinned and red-fleshed apples. Not just good for pest and disease resistance.
- Can you make morphometrics work when you know the right answer? Pick and mix approaches for apple identification. Good job they differ in colour too.
- Systematic establishment of colour descriptor states through image-based phenotyping. Doesn’t work for brown, though.
- High-throughput method for ear phenotyping and kernel weight estimation in maize using ear digital imaging. And the colour doesn’t matter.
- Amplifying plant disease risk through assisted migration. Making AM great.
- Characterization of a diverse USDA collection of wild soybean (Glycine soja Siebold & Zucc.) accessions and subsequent mapping for seed composition and agronomic traits in a RIL population. One of the parents of the RIL population was a wild accession.
- Plant Responses to an Integrated Cropping System Designed to Maintain Yield Whilst Enhancing Soil Properties and Biodiversity. So far, so good.
- Seed longevity phenotyping: recommendations on research methodology. Ok, now there’s no excuse.
Oh, well, except for the paywall. - Evolutionary and domestication history of Cucurbita (pumpkin and squash) species inferred from 44 nuclear loci. All 6 crop taxa in one clade, and some novel relationships with wild species.
- Value Chain Development and the Agrarian Question: Actor Perspectives on Native Potato Production in the Highlands of Peru. Difficult to penetrate the socio-economic jargon, especially without access to the full text, but I think it’s saying that to understand why some value chains for native potatoes work and others don’t, you have to understand that different players want different things. Which seems kinda obvious so I probably don’t have that right.
- Perception of livestock ecosystem services in grazing areas. Not all bad.
Brainfood: Wild palm, Yield trends, Indigenous veggies double, Old goat grass, Saline soy, Carob history, Pesticidal plants, Rapeseed diversity, Livestock positives, Domestication syndrome, Kiwifruit evolution, Forest diversity
- Genetic structure of the Canarian palm tree (Phoenix canariensis) at the island scale: does the “island within islands” concept apply to species with high colonization abilities? High dispersal ability doesn’t always lead to high connectivity among populations.
- Uncertainties of potentials and recent changes in global yields of major crops resulting from census- and satellite-based yield datasets at multiple resolutions. Average overall annual yield increases of about 1.5% for maize, rice, wheat and soybean for 1981 to 2008 are uncertain and probably not sufficient.
- Indigenous underutilized vegetables for food and nutritional security in an island ecosystem. People in the the Andaman and Nicobar Islands eat a lot of different vegetables. Interestingly, most are perennial and a quarter are wild.
- Knowledge Loss and Change Between 2002 and 2017—a Revisit of Plant Use of the Maasai of Sekenani Valley, Maasai Mara, Kenya. But for how long will the above be true?
- Use of grass seed resources c.31 ka by modern humans at the Haua Fteah cave, northeast Libya. Including wild wheat relative(s).
- Soybean PI 675847 A as a new source of salt tolerance. But it can’t be the only one, surely?
- The carob tree at the crossroad of domestication center and refugia hypotheses. Out of the west, surprisingly.
- Pesticidal Plant Extracts Improve Yield and Reduce Insect Pests on Legume Crops Without Harming Beneficial Arthropods. Worth a try.
- Genome-wide selection footprints and deleterious variations in young Asian allotetraploid rapeseed. Asian rapeseed derived from European, diverged, introgressed, split into 2 groups.
- Essential amino acids: master regulators of nutrition and environmental footprint? If you take essential amino acids into account, livestock production doesn’t seem such a bad idea after all.
- Parallel selection on a dormancy gene during domestication of crops from multiple families. Cloned soybean dormancy gene also showed evidence of selection during domestication in rice and tomato.
- Two Likely Auto-Tetraploidization Events Shaped Kiwifruit Genome and Contributed to Establishment of the Actinidiaceae Family. And you can thank them for the high vitamin C content.
- Hydraulic diversity of forests regulates ecosystem resilience during drought. More diverse forests better at coping with dry spells.
Brainfood: Yak diversity, Wheat pre-breeding, Gene conservation, Genome conservation, Wild lentils, Biodiversity definition, Conservation reviews, Bananas treble, Cotton diversity, Pollinator health, Aurochs DNA, USDA cucumbers, Physalis editing, Tomato re-domestication
- Identification and diversity of Y‐chromosome haplotypes in Qinghai yak populations. 2 paternal lineages but weak genetic structure among the 9 populations and 3 breeds.
- Development and characterization of Triticum turgidum–Aegilops umbellulata amphidiploids. A bridge to bread wheat.
- Variation in total root length and root diameter of wild and cultivated lentil grown under drought and re-watered conditions. Some wild species have longer total root length under drought stress than crops. No word on whether bridges needed.
- The Peril of Gene-Targeted Conservation. Only warranted when said targeted genes are important for viability and have large phenotypic effects. Suspect crop breeders (see above) may beg to differ.
- Conservation of biodiversity in the genomics era. Need to target the whole genome, I guess.
- “What Matters Is Species Richness” — High School Students’ Understanding of the Components of Biodiversity. Must try harder.
- What Conservation Does. The right things, more or less, and not at all badly, so stop complaining.
- Absence of evidence for the conservation outcomes of systematic conservation planning around the globe: a systematic map. It’s not evidence of absence of conservation outcomes, but still. Maybe should get together with the above?
- East African diploid and triploid bananas: a genetic complex transported from South-East Asia. All introduced by Austronesian people, probably via Madagascar, but no longer to be found in Asia (much).
- Molecular and Cytogenetic Study of East African Highland Banana. Focuses on one of the 4 groups discussed in the above (Mutika). All derived from maybe a single hybrid clone.
- Sources of resistance to Xanthomonas campestris pv. musacearum, the causal agent of banana Xanthomonas wilt. Why bother with the above, you ask?
- Genetic diversity of day-neutral converted landrace Gossypium hirsutum L. accessions. Eastern and western hemisphere groups, with US varieties closer to the eastern.
- Crop Domestication Alters Floral Reward Chemistry With Potential Consequences for Pollinator Health. In highbush blueberry, domestication has decreased the chemical diversity of nectar and pollen, possibly increasing infection by bee gut pathogens.
- Ancient DNA analysis of Scandinavian medieval drinking horns and the horn of the last aurochs bull. Aurochs interbred with domestic cattle way back. In other news, you can extract aurochs DNA from medieval Scandinavian drinking horns.
- The USDA cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) collection: genetic diversity, population structure, genome-wide association studies, and core collection development. Three groups, more or less: India, E. Asia, and everything else. A third of 1200 accessions recovers 96% of variation.
- Rapid improvement of domestication traits in an orphan crop by genome editing. Tomato orthologues in groundcherry mutated for more fruits and better plant architecture.
- Domestication of wild tomato is accelerated by genome editing. Or you can do it with the actual tomato genes. As suggested a couple of years ago.
Nibbles: Lumnezia, Wild apples, Pistachio, Coconut conservation, Tenant farming, Wild cow, Why genotype, Chicken controversy, Blueberry blues
- The ever-dependable Roads & Kingdoms on a very special Swiss cheese.
- The ever-dependable Mongabay on Kyrgyz apple forests.
- The ever-dependable Simran Sethi on how the California pistachio industry got it’s start.
- The ever-dependable Bioversity with a global strategy for the conservation of coconut genetic diversity.
- The ever-dependable Twitter…no wait. Thread on why farmers with a bigger share in their output produce more.
- A cow wild relative in Myanmar.
- Carolina Sansaloni of CIMMYT on genotyping genebank collections.
- Are chickens “rescuing mute, passive non-Western women”?
- Blueberries are in all kinds of trouble.
Brainfood: Food as art, Maize seed, Jatropha genome, Wild camelids, Global nutrition, Price shocks, Pearl millet domestication, Yam domestication, NNL, New beer microbe, Dog coat colour, Herbarium biases, Maize N fixation
- Food as a daily art: ideas for its use as a method in development practice. Food can bring traditional and scientific knowledge together in an smorgasbord of ideas.
- Maize seed systems in different agro-ecosystems; what works and what does not work for smallholder farmers. Sure, purchasing hybrids from the formal sector seed system is gaining ground in Malawi, Zambia, and Chiapas, but not for home consumption, and only in high potential areas.
- Genome sequence of Jatropha curcas L., a non‐edible biodiesel plant, provides a resource to improve seed‐related traits. Is Jatropha even still a thing?
- Comparing genetic diversity and demographic history in co-distributed wild South American camelids. Vicuña (alpaca wild relative) display lower genetic diversity within populations than guanaco (llama) but more structure across Peru; strong bottlenecks happened at different times, but in both cases much later than domestication and before Spanish conquest.
- The Global Nutrient Database: availability of macronutrients and micronutrients in 195 countries from 1980 to 2013. Supply of micronutrients has increased during the period globally and across levels of development.
- Effects of Food Prices on Poverty: The Case of Paraguay, a Food Exporter and a Non-Fully Urbanized Country. Food price hikes are, overall, bad for everyone, but least bad for the poorest and richest.
- A western Sahara centre of domestication inferred from pearl millet genomes. Harlan’s non-centre not found. Free-to-read.
- Molecular basis of African yam domestication: analyses of selection point to root development, starch biosynthesis, and photosynthesis related genes. Domestication of wild yams was all about learning to grow in full sunlight, and it involved losing 30% of their diversity. But remember current wild yams are not all that wild.
- No net loss for people and biodiversity. How to ensure that people really are no worse off after an offset intervention.
- Identification of a novel interspecific hybrid yeast from a metagenomic open fermentation sample using Hi-C. Doesn’t work on its own, though.
- Length variations within the Merle retrotransposon of canine PMEL: correlating genotype with phenotype. Mobile DNA gets everywhere.
- Widespread sampling biases in herbaria revealed from large‐scale digitization. Blame mega-collectors.
- Nitrogen fixation in a landrace of maize is supported by a mucilage-associated diazotrophic microbiota. In aerial roots, no less.