- Climate-resilient crops: Lessons from xerophytes. Breeding for Na+ exclusion to improve salinity tolerance in crops has compromised their drought tolerance, but both tolerances are down to more gene copies in key families when comparing species.
- Innovation and Technological Mismatch: Experimental Evidence from Improved Crop Seeds. Breeders should strive to give farmers what they want, even if it means releasing multiple locally adapted varieties rather than a single blockbuster.
- Stressors and Resilience within the Cassava Value Chain in Nigeria: Preferred Cassava Variety Traits and Response Strategies of Men and Women to Inform Breeding. Man and women want different things from cassava breeders.
- Intra-household discrete choice experiment for trait preferences: a new method. If only there was a new way to measure that…
- Genome editing to re-domesticate and accelerate use of barley crop wild relatives. No word on whether men and women would edit different genes.
- Understanding Genome Structure Facilitates the Use of Wild Lentil Germplasm for Breeding: A Case Study with Shattering Loci. I suspect neither men nor women would tolerate shattering lentils.
- Repeat turnover meets stable chromosomes: repetitive DNA sequences mark speciation and gene pool boundaries in sugar beet and wild beets. But you can’t use wild species in breeding if you can’t cross them with the crop, and in beet that’s down to the repeatome. So maybe this would make a better case for domestication through gene editing than barley or lentils?
- Development of trait-specific genetic stocks derived from wild Cicer species as novel sources of resistance to important diseases for chickpea improvement. Would be really cool to domesticate one of the really resistant tertiary genepool species.
- Developing Genetic Resources Within the Chenopodium Genus to Advance Quinoa Breeding and the de novo Domestication of C. berlandieri. Not that you need gene editing for domesticating crop wild relatives.
- Genomic traces of Japanese malting barley breeding in two modern high-quality cultivars, ‘Sukai Golden’ and ‘Sachiho Golden’. Old-fashioned breeding has been pretty successful, so who needs CWR, gene editing and discrete choice experiments? ((Last bit added purely for clicks, I’m desperate.))
- Consistent effects of independent domestication events on the plant microbiota. I hope all those gene-editing de novo domesticators are considering the novo microbiomes.
Brainfood: Nutrition edition
- Which crop biodiversity is used by the food industry throughout the world? A first evidence for legume species. Mainly soy, alas. Which is bad because…
- Diversified agriculture leads to diversified diets: panel data evidence from Bangladesh. …promoting diversified farming systems and market participation is good for women’s empowerment and better diets. Which is just as well because…
- Historical shifting in grain mineral density of landmark rice and wheat cultivars released over the past 50 years in India. …breeding hasn’t been good for nutritional content in staples.
- Surviving mutations: how an Indonesian Capsicum frutescens L. cultivar maintains capsaicin biosynthesis despite disruptive mutations. But if you can breed for extreme pungency, you can surely breed for better nutrient content.
- Exploiting Indian landraces to develop biofortified grain sorghum with high protein and minerals. Yep, simple selection can make a sorghum landrace more nutritious.
- Genome-edited foods. Or you could resort to gene editing.
- Adoption and impact of improved amaranth cultivars in Tanzania using DNA fingerprinting. Although maybe it might be easier to just eat more amaranth.
- Stakeholders’ perceptions of and preferences for utilizing fonio (Digitaria exilis) to enrich local diets for food and nutritional security in Nigeria. But documenting knowledge will be key in either case.
- Domestication through clandestine cultivation constrained genetic diversity in magic mushrooms relative to naturalized populations. And watch what you’re doing to diversity.
Nibbles: CAAS genebank, VACS, Opportunity crops, Ross-Ibarra, Canary sweetpotatoes, Land Institute crowdsourcing, BBC seed podcast
- The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences genebank fills some gaps.
- I wonder if any of those new accessions are “opportunity crops.”
- Because they are sorely needed, for example in Africa.
- Which is not to say working on staples like maize isn’t cool. Just ask Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra.
- Working on sweet potato can also be, well, sweet. Case in point: gorgeous book on the varieties of the Canaries.
- There’s an opportunity to help the Land Institute with its research on perennial crops.
- And yes, seeds are indeed alive. Just ask CAAS.
Brainfood: Lima bean network, Obake rice, Feral Canadian apples, African plum seed systems, Canary Island potatoes, Wild potatoes & late blight, Wild lentils & drought, Wild grapes & salt, Robusta core, Ethiopian barley diversity, De novo wheat domestication
- International Lima Bean Network: from the origin of the species to modern plant breeding. And you can join it here.
- Solving the mystery of Obake rice in Africa: population structure analyses of Oryza longistaminata reveal three genetic groups and evidence of both recent and ancient introgression with O. sativa. The wild African O. longistaminata is closer to Asian O. sativa than to other African wild species, and shows evidence of ancient introgression from O. sativa in southern Africa. Definitely worth a network.
- The origins and evolutionary history of feral apples in southern Canada. They are mainly recombinants involving early heritage cultivars, with no hybridization with local wild species. So, not like rice in Africa.
- Can seed exchange networks explain the morphological and genetic diversity in perennial crop species? The case of the tropical fruit tree Dacryodes edulis in rural and urban Cameroon. Cities are hotspots of African plum diversity because people bring in tress from all over the place. So, a bit like apples in Canada.
- Ancient Potato Varieties of the Canary Islands: Their History, Diversity and Origin of the Potato in Europe. “The Andes end in the Canary Islands.” A bit like how the Caucasus ends in Canada?
- Functional diversification of a wild potato immune receptor at its center of origin. Wild species can be used to improve the late blight tolerance of cultivated potatoes.
- Limited-transpiration trait in response to high vapor pressure deficit from wild to cultivated species: study of the Lens genus. Wild species can be used to improve the drought tolerance of cultivated lentils.
- A Tunisian wild grape leads to metabolic fingerprints of salt tolerance. Wild species can be used to improve the salt tolerance of cultivated grapes.
- Characterization of the genetic composition and establishment of a core collection for the INERA Robusta coffee (Coffea canephora) field genebank from the Democratic Republic of Congo. From 730 shrubs to 263 unique genotypes to 10 plants with 93% of the alleles. Some wild stuff involved. Do the same for African plum?
- Genetic diversity within landraces of barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) and its implications on germplasm collection and utilization. Maybe we should do core collections for each landrace?
- Phenotyping and identification of target traits for de novo domestication of wheat wild relatives. Maybe we should try it with that wild African rice too.
Eat this maize podcast
Jeremy’s latest podcast is out, and it’s a doozie. Plus it saves me adding it to the next Brainfood, which is coming soon, don’t worry people.
Modern maize has long been a puzzle. Unlike other domesticated grasses, there didn’t seem to be any wild species that looked like the modern cereal and from which farmers could have selected better versions. For a long time, botanists weren’t even sure which continent maize was from. That seemed to be settled with the discovery in lowland Mexico of teosinte, a wild and weedy relative of maize. But there was a problem. A lot of the later genetic work to understand the transformation of teosinte into maize found remnants of different types of teosinte.
Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra and his colleagues have sorted out the story, which is now more complicated, better understood, and offers some hope for future maize breeding. Their paper was published last week in Science.