- Thiamine improves in vitro propagation of sweetpotato [Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.] – confirmed with a wide range of genotypes. Getting there, keep tweaking…
- Minimizing the deleterious effects of endophytes in plant shoot tip cryopreservation. Something else to tweak.
- Ex Situ Conservation of Plant Genetic Resources: An Overview of Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) and Lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) Worldwide Collections. Thankfully not much in vitro and cryo involved. The main tweak necessary is to share more characterization data with breeders.
- Data, Duplication, and Decentralisation: Gene Bank Management in the 1980s and 1990s. Ah, but do calls for more data also reflect attempts to cut costs and build political bridges? And would that be so bad?
- EURISCO update 2023: the European Search Catalogue for Plant Genetic Resources, a pillar for documentation of genebank material. Arguably, Eurisco tries to do all of the above, and pretty well.
- Bioinformatic Extraction of Functional Genetic Diversity from Heterogeneous Germplasm Collections for Crop Improvement. You need fancy maths to make sense of all that data. And use it.
- Research Status and Trends of Agrobiodiversity and Traditional Knowledge Based on Bibliometric Analysis (1992–Mid-2022). Not much traditional knowledge in those databases, though, eh? That would be one hell of a tweak.
- Species-tailored sampling guidelines remain an efficient method to conserve genetic diversity ex situ: A study on threatened oaks. Meanwhile, some people are still trying to figure out the best way to tweak sampling strategies to add diversity to genebanks. Spoiler alert: you need data on individual species.
- Collecting critically endangered cliff plants using a drone-based sampling manipulator. You also need drones.
- Application of Geographical Information System for PGR Management. One thing you can do with all that data is map stuff. So at least the drones know where to go.
- Incorporating evolutionary and threat processes into crop wild relatives conservation. The only thing that’s missing from this is traditional knowledge. And maybe drones.
- Conserving species’ evolutionary potential and history: opportunities under the new post-2020 global biodiversity framework. All these data will allow us to measure how well we’re doing. And whether we can ask for cryotanks, drones, and better databases.
Brainfood: Indigenous crops, Indian vegetables, Local breeds, Wheat identity, Date names, Food security & heritage, Peruvian cuisine, Food sovereignty, Palestinian seeds, Tea culture, Sacred groves, Food system transformation, Diverse landscapes
- Renaming Indigenous crops and addressing colonial bias in scientific language. Orphan is out, Indigenous is in.
- Vegetable Genetic Resources to Mitigate Nutritional Insecurity in India. How many of these Indian vegetables are Indigenous as opposed to indigenous though?
- Farmers using local livestock biodiversity share more than animal genetic resources: Indications from a workshop with farmers who use local breeds. Farmers using local breeds don’t share colonial bias, I suspect. Or do they? Has anyone checked?
- Because error has a price: A systematic review of the applications of DNA fingerprinting for crop varietal identification. Nobody’s perfect, even the colonially unbiased.
- What lies behind a fruit crop variety name? A case study of the barnī date palm from al-‘Ulā oasis, Saudi Arabia. Local variety names are complicated, no wonder mistakes happen.
- Food security and the cultural heritage missing link. Want to preserve cultural heritage AND boost productivity? Then support (1) preservation of genetic resources, (2) value addition, (3) traditional food processing, (4) preference matching, and (5) agritourism. What, no fighting colonial bias?
- Analysis of Innovation in Peru’s Gastronomic Industry. All of the above?
- Food sovereignty in sub-Saharan Africa: Reality, relevance, and practicality. All of the above are well and good, but not enough. You also need modern varieties. Just get their names right, eh?
- Baladi Seeds in the oPt: Populations as Objects of Preservation and Units of Analysis. Whatever you do, don’t reduce cultural heritage to data.
- Reinventing a Tradition: East Asian Tea Cultures in the Contemporary World. No danger of reducing tea to data, judging by this collection of papers.
- Factors driving the tree species richness in sacred groves in Indian subcontinent: a review. Not religion, apparently, according to the data. Go figure.
- The role of traditional knowledge and food biodiversity to transform modern food systems. There is plenty of evidence out there that bringing greater biodiversity into food systems results in multiple socio-cultural benefits. As this Brainfood, as well as the case studies in this paper, tries to show.
- Complex agricultural landscapes host more biodiversity than simple ones: A global meta-analysis. Had enough?
Brainfood: Opuntia breeding, Teosinte genes, Sugarcane breeding, Proso diversity, Watermelon diversity, Wheat pre-breeding, Sorghum wild relatives, Grasspea evaluation, Banana domestication, Pea pan-genome, Bambara diversity
- Needs and strategies for breeding and sustainable use of genetic resources in Opuntia. Surely there are molecular markers for spinelessness by now?
- Teosinte confers specific alleles and yield potential to maize improvement. There are 71 QTLs associated with 24 differential traits between maize and teosinte.
- A short review on sugarcane: its domestication, molecular manipulations and future perspectives. Forget sugar or fuel, the future is vaccine production.
- SNP discovery in proso millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) using low-pass genome sequencing. Ok, but why are the South Asian accessions so different from everything else?
- Meta-analysis of qualitative and quantitative trait variation in sweet watermelon and citron watermelon genetic resources. Rob citron to pay sweet watermelon.
- Genomics-informed prebreeding unlocks the diversity in genebanks for wheat improvement. How I learned to stop worrying and love non-adapted germplasm.
- Wild Sorghum as a Promising Resource for Crop Improvement. Oooh, I like the idea of de novo domestication of Australian wild sorghum species.
- Disentangling the Genetic Diversity of Grass Pea Germplasm Grown under Lowland and Highland Conditions. Always good to have multi-locational trial data, even when n=2.
- Hybridization, missing wild ancestors and the domestication of cultivated diploid bananas. Let the search for the 3 unknown wild ancestors begin!
- Improved pea reference genome and pan-genome highlight genomic features and evolutionary characteristics. If only Mendel had worked on wild peas too.
- Genetic diversity and population structure analyses of South African Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea [L.] Verdc) collections using SNP markers. Two heterotic groups to play around with.
Brainfood: Wild scarlet runner beans, Wild coffee, Mexican vanilla, Hybrid barley, Zea genus, Wild maize gene, N-fixing xylem microbiota, Drone phenotyping, Wild tomato, Potato breeding, Wild potato, Wheat evaluation, Rice breeding returns
- The genomic signature of wild-to-crop introgression during the domestication of scarlet runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus L.). The wild Mexican genepool is helping to counteract the effects of the domestication bottleneck.
- Genetic variation in wild and cultivated Arabica coffee (Coffea arabica L.): Evolutionary origin, global distribution, and its effect on fungal disease incidence in Southwest Ethiopia. Domesticated disease-resistant cultivars are threatening the genetic integrity of the wild genepool. You win some, you lose some.
- Uncovering haplotype diversity in cultivated Mexican vanilla species. Plenty of evidence of past hybridization events in cultivated vanilla in Mexico. Maybe it can swap stories with scarlet runner bean.
- Six-rowed wild-growing barleys are hybrids of diverse origins. In the case of barley, the wild-cultivated hybrids even got a separate Latin binomial.
- Portrait of a genus: genome sequencing reveals evidence of adaptive variation in Zea. Lots of variation in interesting adaptive traits in the wild relatives of maize. Did they, or will they, make their way into the crop, I wonder?
- An adaptive teosinte mexicana introgression modulates phosphatidylcholine levels and is associated with maize flowering time. This one did.
- A highly conserved core bacterial microbiota with nitrogen-fixation capacity inhabits the xylem sap in maize plants. Its wild relatives are not the only wild organisms maize benefits from.
- Phenomic data-facilitated rust and senescence prediction in maize using machine learning algorithms. Drones and fancy maths can be used to predict and document southern rust infection in maize. Maybe in wild relatives too one day, who knows.
- A Solanum lycopersicoides reference genome facilitates insights into tomato specialized metabolism and immunity. A tomato wild relative has a gene for resistance to bacterial speck disease, so of course they had to sequence its genome.
- Genetic gains in potato breeding as measured by field testing of cultivars released during the last 200 years in the Nordic Region of Europe. Genetic gains for yield (measured in non-target environments) were not that great and contributed about half of productivity gains. Results for other traits were even worse, mainly because of stringent market demands. So no chance of using wild relatives I suppose.
- Genotypic Response and Selection of Potato Germplasm Under Heat Stress. Not so fast…
- Dataset of historic and modern bread and durum wheat cultivar performance under conventional and reduced tillage with full and reduced irrigation. I wonder to what extent wild relatives contributed to the differences.
- Assessing returns to research investments in rice varietal development: Evidence from the Philippines and Bangladesh. Net returns from collaboration in rice breeding between IRRI and national partners are still strong in the Philippines and Bangladesh, but declining, and faster in the former than the latter. Plenty of genes from wild relatives in IRRI lines of course. Maybe there could be more?
Nibbles: Gulf garden, Lettuce evaluation, Jordanian olive, Kenyan seeds, Hybrid animals, FAOSTAT news
- Qatari botanic garden is providing training in food security, and more. Good for them.
- The European Evaluation Network’s lettuce boffins have themselves a meeting. Pretty amazing this made it to FreshPlaza, and with that headline.
- The Jordan Times pretty much mangles what is a perfectly nice, though inevitably nuanced, story about the genetic depth of Jordan’s olives.
- In Kenya’s seed system, whatever is not forbidden in proposed new legislation…may not be enough.
- Conservation through hybridization.
- FAOSTAT now has a bit that gives you access to national agricultural census data. Which sounds quite important but give us a few days to check it.