- IITA set to expand its ability to provide the world with yam diversity.
- “Agricultural biodiversity is essential for farmers as it places them in a better position to manage climate change.” Wait, what?
- An exotic melon is found in Birmingham, UK. But can you make juice from its seeds?
- James dissects the latest genome announcement: cacao. Ignore the press release, just read this.
- Biotropica has a special issue on biodiversity. Even some agrobiodiversity.
- The history of food consumption in the 20th century. Scary reading.
- New Internationalist magazine has a special issue on seed saving! But only a couple of articles available online, alas.
- Wonderful photos of the rice harvest from Flickr.
- Mongolian cashmere can only get more expensive.
- Australians have more to cope with than a back-stabbing prime minister, it seems. Their eucalypts are in trouble. Something to do with fire, maybe.
Nibbles: Maize RNA, Hybrids, Cacao, Banana stats, Biofuels, Barley water, Ecosystem services, Coca, Chinese medicinals, Hunger
- Maize boffins move on to RNA. Hard row to hoe.
- The coolness of hybrids. No, not the cars. Includes crop wild relatives.
- Bioversity makes the case that cacao is charismatic. Hard row to hoe.
- IITA tries to crowdsource banana production data. Hard row to hoe. BTW, why not include variety information? Well, maybe they will.
- Jatropha rebooted?
- The history of barley water. Surprisingly weird.
- Cory Bradshaw’s presentation on the global erosion of ecosystem services. A quick look reveals little on that often overlooked service: the provision of diversity for agriculture.
- The importance of coca in Andean culture.
- Chinese medicinal herbs doing just fine in North Carolina.
- FAO hunger report parsed by The Guardian.
Nibbles: Heirloom Auction, Flatulence, Trade, Swaziland, Turkey genome, Sorghum
- The Art of Farming: How to fund heirloom veggies, NYC black-tie style.
- Oregano to save the planet from bovine emissions.
- Kew blogs “strange articles of trade“, all examples of agricultural biodiversity. How about them worms?
- Swazi farmer breaks with grazing tradition to adapt to climate change.
- Another day, another DNA “sequence”. The turkey.
- Overselling popped sorghum? On YouTube.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s Super Rice.
Cutting through the hype, there may be some substance in the announcement by the University of Arizona that it is leading a team funded to the tune of USD 9.9 million “to develop ‘super rice’“. ((Come to think of super-rice would be cheap at that price.)) The plan is to understand the genomes of all 24 rice species, the better to breed the two species — Oryza sativa and O. glaberrima — that yield the rice crop.
The announcement contains a lot of information about how this effort will help researchers to understand the evolutionary history and current functioning of rice. But there’s also a food security angle, natch.
“During the domestication process, people end up selecting a couple of plants and crossing them,” [said University of Arizona plant scientist Rod] Wing. “This way, one of them became the founder of all the domesticated plants. That variety was then improved over thousands of years, but it contains only a very small variety of genes that could be used for crop improvement.” … This so-called domestication bottleneck leads to crop plants with highly desirable traits such as high yield but deficiencies in other areas such as compromised ability to fight off diseases or cope with droughts.
I expect the researchers might be wondering whether they can duplicate the domestication events that resulted in modern rice, as wheat researchers did in constructing synthetic bread wheats, injecting a whole lot more agricultural biodiversity into the crop.
And here’s a cool idea; spend some of the loot on public awareness:
As an outreach component, the project will include a biannual Plant Science Family Night program at Ventana Vista Elementary School in Tucson, targeting K-5 students and families, with the goal of getting children and their families in the greater Tucson area excited about plants and the role plant science plays in ensuring a safe, sustainable and secure food supply for our planet.
Shouldn’t every big grant do something similar?
Not the wheat genome sequence
The International Wheat Genome Sequence Consortium, an international consortium of wheat growers, public and private breeders and scientists, strongly disagrees with implications that the sequence reads made available by a UK team, led by Professor Neil Hall, represent in any way the sequence of the wheat genome or that this work is comparable to genome sequences for rice, maize, or soybean.