- An analysis of the transformative potential of major food system report recommendations. Most recommendations are nudges rather than transformative. But is that such a bad thing?
- Linking farm production diversity to household dietary diversity controlling market access and agricultural technology usage: evidence from Noakhali district, Bangladesh. Farm diversity is associated with dietary diversity, but less if markets and irrigation are to hand. Phew, that’s good.
- Leveraging millets for developing climate resilient agriculture. Never mind the yield, feel the stability. Plus they’re good for you.
- Exploring the legacy of Central European historical winter wheat landraces. Not great that breeding has narrowed the genepool. Will it happen to millets next?
- A European perspective on opportunities and demands for field-based crop phenotyping. Would be good to have more sites in Central Europe, no?
- Genetic dissection of seasonal vegetation index dynamics in maize through aerial based high-throughput phenotyping. 1752 accessions fall into 2 phenological groups. Do it in Europe next?
- Changes in soybean cultivars released over the past 50 years in southern Brazil. Yield has gone up, but protein concentration down. No word on stability. Nor overall diversity. Good and bad.
- The grain quality of wheat wild relatives in the evolutionary context. Breeders should focus on the timopheevii lineage if they want to do some good.
- Signatures of selection in recently domesticated macadamia. Further evidence for the one-step domestication of clonal crops.
- Emerging evidence of plant domestication as a landscape-level process. One-step is precisely how domestication did NOT happen for seed crops in the Neolithic though.
- Conservation and use of genetic resources of cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) by gene banks and nurseries in six Latin American countries. Not a great situation for such a financially important crop. Makes you think.
- Chloroplast phylogenomics in Camelina (Brassicaceae) reveals multiple origins of polyploid species and the maternal lineage of C. sativa. Such a lot of work, and they still don’t know in which landscape domestication took place.
- Making the invisible visible: tracing the origins of plants in West African cuisine through archaeobotanical and organic residue analysis. 3500 years of continuity in West African cooking investigated via lipid profiles on pottery. And fast forward…
Brainfood: Racism, Writing, QMS, Andean ag, Root breeding, Apple microbiome, Manihot phylogeny, Mukodamashi millet
- Overcoming racism in the twin spheres of conservation science and practice. Imagine.
- Getting accepted – Successful writing for scientific publication: a Research Primer for low- and middle-income countries. See above.
- A Performance Management System for Long-Term Germplasm Conservation in CGIAR Genebanks: Aiming for Quality, Efficiency and Improvement. Say what you do, do what you say, have someone verify it, correct it, improve it. Then repeat.
- Quinoa, potatoes, and llamas fueled emergent social complexity in the Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes. Who needs maize, am I right?
- Harnessing root architecture to address global challenges. Something else for breeders to scour genebanks for.
- Evidence for host–microbiome co-evolution in apple. The genetic patterns in the endophytic microbiome of 11 wild and cultivated apple species mirrors the phylogenetic relationships among the species.
- Phylogenomic analysis points to a South American origin of Manihot and illuminates the primary gene pool of cassava. At least five wild species have contributed diversity to cassava. No word on microbiomes.
- Genetic Identification of the Local Mukodamashi Varieties of Foxtail Millet (Setaria italica (L.) P. Beauv) in Japan. Mukodamashi means “deceiving husband” and the legend is that when a wife makes dumplings from this millet variety, the husband mistakes them for rice cakes because the grains are white and sticky. Thing is though, it’s not just one variety.
Nibbles: Archaeobotany, Citrus genebank, Vitellaria, Potato genebank, Pignolo, IK, Atlas of Living Australia,
- Q&A with an archaeobotanist looking into the domestication history of maize and gourds.
- Q&A with the curators of the University of California, Riverside Citrus Variety Collection.
- Q&A on the shea tree genome.
- CIP’s potato cryobank. There’s probably a Q&A somewhere too.
- Snippets of a review of an interesting-sounding book about the almost-forgotten Pignolo grape.
- Snippets of the Indigenous ecological knowledge used by traditional agriculturalists in India.
- A more systematic approach to documenting and protecting Indigenous ecological knowledge from Australia.
Nibbles: China agrobiodiversity, Hedge apple, Maize history, AI and extinction, Mapping pastures, Mapping foodscapes
- China makes progress in its agrobiodiversity census.
- Osage orange history deconstructed: “horse high, hog tight, and bull strong.”
- Maize history deconstructed.
- Using AI to assess the vulnerability of plant species. Vulnerability of landraces next?
- Not sure about landraces, but maybe pasturelands?
- Mapping food systems to save them.
Brainfood: IK, CWR, AnGR valuation double, Open cryo hardware, Seed pathogens, Perennial grains, Tropical forages, Tree breeding, Resurrection, Arabica origins, Fragaria, CIP sweetpotato
- Contributions of Indigenous Knowledge to ecological and evolutionary understanding. The importance of IK is considerable for PGRFA conservation and use too, of course, and the injunction to “enter into a thoughtful social contract with IK holders, foremost working toward partnered research that benefits the communities, governments, and nations of Indigenous peoples” goes double.
- Harnessing Crop Wild Diversity for Climate Change Adaptation.. …needs open data. Genomic data, that is, rather than IK. I wonder if there’s quid pro quo here.
- Genetic Identity, Diversity, and Population Structure of CIP’s Sweetpotato (I. batatas) Germplasm Collection. An entire collection of about 6000 accessions genotyped to reveal 4 ancestral populations, some duplication within and between genebanks, plus possible mistakes in labelling. Ah, data!
- Information use and its effects on the valuation of agricultural genetic resources. Giving the public more data may increase the support for animal genetic resources conservation. But what kind of data? Read on…
- Consumers’ knowledge and perceptions of endangered livestock breeds: How wording influences conservation efforts. Focus on the nice taste rather than the rarity or endangerment of breeds, as it turns out. Accentuate the positive?
- The emerging role of open technologies for community-based improvement of cryopreservation and quality management for repository development in aquatic species. Hardware can be open too.
- Longevity of Plant Pathogens in Dry Agricultural Seeds during 30 Years of Storage. Clean your seeds, genebanks.
- Sustainable agriculture through perennial grains: Wheat, rice, maize, and other species. A review. Promises, promises…
- Tapping Into the Environmental Co-benefits of Improved Tropical Forages for an Agroecological Transformation of Livestock Production Systems. Location, location, location.
- ‘Systems approach’ plant breeding illustrated by trees. Link up different plant breeding approaches in fun ways rather than doubling down on any single one.
- A pragmatic and prudent consensus on the resurrection of extinct plant species using herbarium specimens. I must say I would not have been so prudent.
- Validating South Sudan as a Center of Origin for Coffea arabica: Implications for Conservation and Coffee Crop Improvement. No time for prudence here.
- Diversification, spread, and admixture of octoploid strawberry in the Western Hemisphere. Yes, that’s all very interesting, but tell me more about that Hawaiian strawberry.