- How can developmental biology help feed a growing population? By figuring out how domestication hacked developmental processes.
- Distinct characteristics of genes associated with phenome-wide variation in maize (Zea mays). Analyzing a lot of traits at a time identifies a different set of phenotypically causal genes than more conventional single-trait approaches. What it all means in practice I have no idea, you tell me.
- Sunflower pan-genome analysis shows that hybridization altered gene content and disease resistance. Not only is one trait not enough, one genome is not enough.
- Agriculturally productive yet biodiverse: human benefits and conservation values along a forest-agriculture gradient in Southern Ethiopia. Depends what you mean by productive.
- Does providing agricultural and nutrition information to both men and women improve household food security? Evidence from Malawi. Yes.
- Principles of effective collaboration in agricultural development and research for impact. Learn from the birds.
- Opening the dialogue: Research networks between high‐ and low‐income countries further understanding of global agro‐climatic challenges. See above. Maybe.
- The global burden of pathogens and pests on major food crops. About 20%. We talked about this…
- Resistance gene cloning from a wild crop relative by sequence capture and association genetics. A new way to reduce the above, using crop wild relatives.
- Adding color to a century‐old enigma: multi‐color chromosome identification unravels the autotriploid nature of saffron (Crocus sativus) as a hybrid of wild Crocus cartwrightianus cytotypes. Which means you can now re-synthesize it.
- Crop wild relative diversity and conservation planning in two isolated oceanic islands of a biodiversity hotspot (Mauritius and Rodrigues). Basically coffee.
- Diversity and conservation priorities of crop wild relatives in Mexico. Over 300 species, but not coffee.
- Benefit sharing mechanisms for agricultural genetic diversity use and on-farm conservation. Profit-sharing is better for conservation than technology transfer.
- Are Cocoa Farmers in Trinidad Happy? Exploring Factors Affecting their Happiness. Well, those whose main crop was not cacao are happier, which must say something.
- Edible fruits from Brazilian biodiversity: A review on their sensorial characteristics versus bioactivity as tool to select research. Eat Anacardium occidentale, Passiflora edulis and Acrocomia aculeata to be happiest. Seems very unadventurous, though.
- Genetic differentiation in leaf phenology among natural populations of Adansonia digitata L. follows climatic clines. Anyone going to do this for all those Brazilian fruits?
Brainfood: Gene mining, Using genebanks, Wild tomato hybrids, Domestication genes, Intensification, Cicer photoperiod, China ABS, Hybridization, Conservation vs livelihoods, Flax evolution, Clean cassava
- Seeing nature as a ‘universal store of genes’: How biological diversity became ‘genetic resources’, 1890–1940. “Beyond the space-time of Neo-mendelian and Morganian laboratory genetics, genes became understood though a geographical gaze at a planetary scale.”
- Harnessing the potential of germplasm collections. Start with diverse germplasm, then edit in domestication genes.
- Spatial proximity determines post-speciation introgression in Solanum. But said introgression is not that important, in the grand evolutionary scheme of things, at least for these wild tomatoes.
- Understanding Grass Domestication through Maize Mutants. It’s not straightforward, because domestication genes work differently in maize, because of differences in regulation.
- May innovation on plant varieties share agricultural land with nature, or spare land for it? It may do both, under certain conditions. If I understand the economics jargon correctly.
- Photoperiod Response of Annual Wild Cicer Species and Cultivated Chickpea on Phenology, Growth, and Yield Traits. They need 15-18h to flower.
- China’s Legal Issues in the Access and Benefit-sharing of the Genetic Resources. …need addressing urgently.
- Insights from genomes into the evolutionary importance and prevalence of hybridization in nature. It’s everywhere, but whether it’s adaptive is hard to prove. One crop example: common bean.
- Incorporating basic needs to reconcile poverty and ecosystem services. Complicated but workable methodology to identify the win-win solution space.
- Flax latitudinal adaptation at LuTFL1 altered architecture and promoted fiber production. Flax became a fibre crop when it was carried north into Europe as a result of adaptation to higher latitudes, including by introgression from local wild species.
- A method for generating virus-free cassava plants to combat viral disease epidemics in Africa. Chemo- and thermotherapy in tissue culture.
8000 years of agricultural history in two papers
A paper just out in Quaternary Science Reviews provides an overview of the first 3000 years of the spread of cultivated cereals around Eurasia, based on archaeobotanical evidence. The paper has some nice maps, but the press release has a really cool animated gif, which I had no hesitation in stealing.
Here’s a quick summary:
- Before 5000 BCE: farming communities used foothill, alluvial and catchment locations in different parts of Eurasia.
- Between 5000-2500 BCE: crops move around, but remain ecologically constrained, with the Tibetan Plateau and the Asian monsoons separating east from west, and north from south.
- Between 2500-1500 BCE: crops are taken to new thermal and hydrologic contexts, bringing previously isolated agricultural systems together.
And where are we now? Well, for that you need another new paper, this one in PLOS ONE: Regional and global shifts in crop diversity through the Anthropocene. As luck would have it, three phases here too, covering the past 50 years:
- little change in crop diversity from 1961 through to the late 1970s
- a 10-year period of sharp diversification through the early 1980s
- “levelling-off” of crop diversification beginning in the early 1990s
No gif, alas, but there’s a little video accompanying the press release in which the author summarizes the results.
The title of that press release says it all really: “A small number of crops are dominating globally. And that’s bad news for sustainable agriculture.” Compare and contrast with the findings of Colin Khoury and friends from a couple of years back on the increasing homogeneity of global diets. Basically looking at the same data in a somewhat different way: pretty much the same result.
Brainfood: Sinotato, Photophenomics, Bangladesh lentils, Vernalization gene, Droning on, Pathogen identification, Human domestication, Citrus cryo, Purple rain, Teff diversity, Mining biodiversity lit, Wild dates, Buckwheat improvement, Panicum genome
- Potato and Food Security in China. Huge expansion, mainly due to product diversification, but still room for growth. But how will it end? Like bananas?
- Converging phenomics and genomics to study natural variation in plant photosynthetic efficiency. Chlorophyll fluorescence technologies are revolutionizing phenotyping. Now everyone will want another gadget.
- Is DNA fingerprinting the gold standard for estimation of adoption and impacts of improved lentil varieties? It’s not about yield.
- A florigen paralog is required for short-day vernalization in a pooid grass. Nope, I can’t say it better than the press release: Ancient gene duplication gave grasses multiple ways to wait out winter.
- Drones for Conservation in Protected Areas: Present and Future. Sure, why not. On-farm too?
- Genome-Enhanced Detection and Identification (GEDI) of plant pathogens. Sort of barcoding for bugs.
- Self-domestication in Homo sapiens: Insights from comparative genomics. There’s a domestication syndrome for humans too.
- Cryopreservation of Citrus limon (L.) Burm. F Shoot Tips Using a Droplet-vitrification Method. Well, at least two varieties work.
- Farmers Drive Genetic Diversity of Thai Purple Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Landraces. Well, who else?
- Genetic Diversity of Ethiopian Tef [(Eragrostis tef (Zucc.) Trotter] Released and Selected Farmers’ Varieties along with Two Wild Relatives as Revealed by Microsatellite Markers. The landraces are distinct from the released varieties, and more diverse.
- Biodiversity Observations Miner: A web application to unlock primary biodiversity data from published literature. Nice enough, but you need to upload a PDF corpus. Why not let it loose on the internet?
- Cross-species hybridization and the origin of North African date palms. I always knew that P. theophrasti would come in useful.
- Revisiting the versatile buckwheat: reinvigorating genetic gains through integrated breeding and genomics approach. Start with a database, core collection, and wild relatives. Gratifyingly old-fashioned.
- The genome of broomcorn millet. That would be Panicum miliaceum.
Brainfood: Tibetan barley, Eastern Sahel domestication, CC & coffee, Good bugs, Garden Organic, Amazonian domestication, Maize domestication, Maize & CC, Acidless citrus, Seed commons book, Crispy blueberry, African hunter-gatherers, Indian forages, Brazilian PGR, Cloudberry picking, Wheat & CC
- Origin and evolution of qingke barley in Tibet. Tibetan barley was introduced from the southwest.
- On the Origins and Dissemination of Domesticated Sorghum and Pearl Millet across Africa and into India: a View from the Butana Group of the Far Eastern Sahel. Sorghum and pearl millet got to India from Sudan. No word on whether they ever got to Tibet.
- Was there ever a Neolithic in the Neotropics? Plant familiarisation and biodiversity in the Amazon. Depends on how you define it.
- The earliest maize from San Marcos Tehuacán is a partial domesticate with genomic evidence of inbreeding. The earliest proto-maize was inbred.
- Evaluating Future Impacts of Climate Change on Traditional Mexican Maize Suitability and Indigenous Communities in Mexico. Landraces are going to lose half their area of suitability.
- Why could the coffee crop endure climate change and global warming to a greater extent than previously estimated? Because of carbon dioxide?
- Understanding and exploiting plant beneficial microbes. We’re going to need microbial consortia.
- Genetic analysis of a heritage variety collection. The Heritage Seed Library, in fact.
- Noemi Controls Production of Flavonoid Pigments and Fruit Acidity and Illustrates the Domestication Routes of Modern Citrus Varieties. In citron, limetta, sweet lime, lemon, and sweet orange, acidless phenotypes are associated with large deletions or insertions of retrotransposons in a single gene. Some of them go back a long way, and are associated with ritual use in Jewish culture.
- Introduction: Commoning the seeds: the future of agrobiodiversity and food security. Is there a way out of the current impasse? Maybe.
- Molecular and Genetic Bases of Fruit Firmness Variation in Blueberry—A Review. It’s still unclear whether firmness is a quantitative trait or monogenic.
- Hunter-gatherer genomes reveal diverse demographic trajectories following the rise of farming in East Africa. Hunter-gatherers were more inventive in Africa than in Europe in the face of agricultural expansion.
- Tropical Forage Legumes in India: Status and Scope for Sustaining Livestock Production. >3200 accessions conserved, >50 cultivars released.
- Conservation of crop genetic resources in Brazil in the context of the target 9 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. A lot done, a lot still to do. CWR remain a gap.
- The Impacts of Climate and Social Changes on Cloudberry (Bakeapple) Picking: a Case Study from Southeastern Labrador. Social changes have been more significant, but for how long?
- Global wheat production with 1.5 and 2.0°C above pre‐industrial warming. Frequency of extreme low yields and variability will increase in hot places like India. Assuming no new varieties.