- New Year Resolution No. 1: Take the mashua survey.
- New Year Resolution No. 2: Give the Food Programme a break, it can be not bad. As in the case of the recent episode featuring Irish Seed Savers and the only uniquely British veg.
- New Year Resolution No. 3: Learn to appreciate hour-plus talks by CG Centre DGs. And other publicity stunts…
- New Year Resolution No. 4: Give a damn about the next genome. Well, actually…
- New Year Resolution No. 5: Try to understand what people think may be going on with malnutrition in India. If anything.
- New Year Resolution No. 6: Marvel at new maps without fretting about how difficult to use they may be.
- New Year Resolution No. 7: Do not snigger at the British honours system.
- New Year Resolution No. 8: Disengage from the whole are-GMOs-good-or-bad? thing. It’s the wrong question, and nobody is listening anyhow.
- New Year Resolution No. 9: Ignore the next lactose tolerance evolution story. They’re all the same.
- New Year Resolution No. 10: Stop obsessing about beer. But not yet. No, not yet.
- Happy 2013!
Brainfood: Beans, Pollinator decline, Wheat mixtures, Outcrossing
- Multiple origins of the determinate growth habit in domesticated common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). Bush beans happened often, maybe even the seven times other evidence suggests.
- Detecting Insect Pollinator Declines on Regional and Global Scales. Will cost you $2 million.
- Mixtures of genetically modified wheat lines outperform monocultures. Neat; the mixture components differed only in their pathogen resistance traits.
- Plant chemistry underlies herbivore-mediated inbreeding depression in nature. Herbivores probably good for outcrossing.
Nibbles: Rice farming, Funny teas, Funny fruits, Christmas fare, Online course, Seasonal genomes, Malaysia shares, School shares
- The most beautiful rice farm in the world. No, wait.
- Jasmine tea gets protection. But does it need it? Let’s ask the South Africans what they’re doing with their tea.
- Today’s funny fruit picture. Think it’s one of these Cuban mutants?
- How many micronutrients in a Mexican Christmas dinner? And how many in a British one, featuring parsnips of course.
- People’s University has online Appreciation Programme on Sustainable Management of Biodiversity starting January 2013.
- First farmers were first carpenters.
- And today’s genome story is very seasonally appropriate. Oh no, here’s another one!
- Malaysia implements the ITPGRFA. Cool, but why is that even news?
- School sends okra seeds to Haiti. But… No, I’m not playing the Grinch on this one, it’s too sweet.
Going wild at Asilomar
Breeders and genomics researchers are meeting at the Asilomar Conference Grounds, Pacific Grove, California to discuss how genomics can facilitate the use of crop wild in crop improvement. Follow on Twitter using #cwrgenomics. The wild lupin in the photo is found on the sand dunes just outside the conference facilities. There’s also a smaller, rarer one, but I haven’t found it yet.
Brainfood: Core collections, Romanian pigs, Commons, Valuation, Biofortification, Yam characterization, Pompeii diet, Rice grain genetics
- Maximizing genetic differentiation in core collections by PCA-based clustering of molecular marker data. It works. In simulations, to be fair.
- Study of rare traditional pork breeds concerning the aspect of biodiversity conservation. Mangalitsa is what you want, apparently.
- Open Variety Rights: Rethinking the Commodification of Plants. A “protected commons”? Sounds a bit like the ITPGRFA to me.
- Natural and cultural heritage in mountain landscapes: towards an integrated valuation. Yeah, but does your cultural heritage include things like agricultural biodiversity?
- Fortifying plants with the essential amino acids lysine and methionine to improve nutritional quality. Conventional breeding hasn’t worked. But has it been for want of trying? Just askin’.
- Genetic and phenotypic diversity in a germplasm working collection of cultivated tropical yams (Dioscorea spp.). Relationships among species, synonyms, duplicates, yada yada.
- Roman food refuse: urban archaeobotany in Pompeii, Regio VI, Insula 1. Romans ate a Mediterranean diet. Still no cure for cancer.
- Genetic bases of rice grain shape: so many genes, so little known. Why bother? Just askin’.