- On the post-glacial spread of human commensal Arabidopsis thaliana. A bit like Neanderthals.
- Exploration of the genetic diversity of cultivated potato and its wild progenitors (Solanum sect. Petota) with insights into potato domestication and genome evolution. Elite cultivars are a pretty diverse lot.
- Fundamental species traits explain provisioning services of tropical American palms. Bigger, more widespread species are more important to local people. Which means some useful things may be being missed.
- Genotyping-by-sequencing provides the first well-resolved phylogeny for coffee (Coffea) and insights into the evolution of caffeine content in its species: GBS coffee phylogeny and the evolution of caffeine content. Origin of the genus could be Africa. Or Asia. Or the Arabian Peninsula. So that narrows it down.
- A quiet harvest: linkage between ritual, seed selection and the historical use of the finger-bladed knife as a traditional plant breeding tool in Ifugao, Philippines. People kept old harvesting technology because it helped them show due reverence to the rice plant, and select seeds.
- Old Crop, New Society: Persistence and Change of Tartary Buckwheat Farming in Yunnan, China. It’s going down, but won’t disappear. No word on what’s happening to diversity though.
- Tapping the genetic diversity of landraces in allogamous crops with doubled haploid lines: a case study from European flint maize. The things people have to do to make use of landraces.
- Conservation of indigenous cattle genetic resources in Southern Africa’s smallholder areas: turning threats into opportunities — A review. We now the breeds, but not all their characteristics, and how to get the most out of them.
- The Importance of Endophenotypes to Evaluate the Relationship between Genotype and External Phenotype. Oh for pity’s sake, something else to worry about.
Brainfood: Cotton domestication, Niche modelling, Finger millet double, Bird flu, Lake Chad millet, USDA Ethiopian sorghum, Phast phenotyping, Corchorus genomes
- Genome-wide divergence, haplotype distribution and population demographic histories for Gossypium hirsutum and Gossypium barbadense as revealed by genome-anchored SNPs. Parallel domestication.
- Integrating species distribution modelling into decision-making to inform conservation actions. You need really nice maps.
- Establishing a core collection of finger millet (Eleusine coracana [L.] Gaertn.) ex situ holdings of the Ethiopian genebank. Particularly interesting for the discussion of what to do with the core, now that it exists.
- Characterization of Some Ex Situ Conserved Finger Millet (Eleusine coracana (L.[/efn_note] Germplasm Accessions in Sri Lanka. Unlike this one.
- Global mapping of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 and H5Nx clade 2.3.4.4 viruses with spatial cross-validation. It’s the intensively raised chickens.
- Unexpected pattern of pearl millet genetic diversity among ethno-linguistic groups in the Lake Chad Basin. Different linguistic groups have genetically distinct pearl millet, but only on the western side of the lake.
- Genomic characterization of a core set of the USDA-NPGS Ethiopian sorghum germplasm collection: implications for germplasm conservation, evaluation, and utilization in crop improvement. 7,217 accessions from Ethiopia, 374 in the core subset, representing 11 highly admixed and very diverse populations.
- High-throughput phenotyping and QTL mapping reveals the genetic architecture of maize plant growth. Brave new world.
- Comparative genomics of two jute species and insight into fibre biogenesis. There are a few but interesting genetic differences between the 2 species of Corchorus cultivated for fibre. No word on the differences between fibre and vegetable varieties, if any.
Brainfood: Managing seeds, Botanical gardens, Potato genomics, Marketing Amazonian fruits, Camel diversity, Potato mineral diversity, Turkish cats, Göbekli Tepe, Kuznets curve
- SeedUSoon: A New Software Program to Improve Seed Stock Management and Plant Line Exchanges between Research Laboratories. Great name.
- Building a Global System for the conservation and use of all plant diversity. Botanical gardens learning from crop genebanks?
- Understanding potato with the help of genomics. Crop genebank learning from genomics.
- What are the socioeconomic implications of the value chain of biodiversity products? A case study in Northeastern Brazil. Two Amazonian fruits, very different markets.
- Weak Genetic Structure in Northern African Dromedary Camels Reflects Their Unique Evolutionary History. Severe bottlenecks and long-distance movement makes for quite a genetic mess.
- Genetic variation for tuber mineral concentrations in accessions of the Commonwealth Potato Collection. Is considerable, and might be useful in breeding. I’m shocked.
- The Domestic Livestock Resources of Turkey: Social Aspects, Genetic Resources and Conservation of Companion Animal Cats (Felis Catus). The nondescript cats are not in danger.
- Feasting, Social Complexity, and the Emergence of the Early Neolithic of Upper Mesopotamia: A View from Göbekli Tepe. Agriculture as a result of religious feasting. No word on the role of cats.
- Economic Development and Forest Cover: Evidence from Satellite Data. More money = more deforestation.
Nibbles: Coffee & chocolate redux, American Indian food, Crop seed size, Oca breeding club, Black chicken, Deadly lychees, Arctic potatoes, Eat this animal-derived food
- Genetics will save coffee.
- And probably chocolate too, but not alone: new podcast from Simran Sethi.
- Must be catching.
- Native American foodways get a resource guide.
- Cultivated plants have larger seeds than wild relatives. Well I never.
- Wanna breed oca?
- A chicken after my own black heart.
- Even tasty fruits can be deadly.
- Commonwealth Potato Collection goes to Svalbard.
- Got milk! Jeremy’s latest pod.
Coconut history 102
Yesterday’ post by Hugh Harries on the recent article in AramcoWord entitled Cracking Coconut’s History, by Ramin Ganeshram, elicited this response from another coconut expert, Luc Baudouin, on the coconut google group.
I enjoyed reading the [article], especially the picture from Dioscorides’s Tractatus De Herbis, a 15th Century manuscript. Congratulations to the author. While I share several of Hugh’s comments, I beg to differ as regards the presence of coconut on the Pacific coast of America. Several travellers mention its presence and provide multiple evidence. I will mention only two diagnostic traits.
The first one is simply that coconut has huge fruits, unparalleled among palms (except for Lodoicea maldivica, known as… the sea coconut). That the coconut fruit is as big as a human head was mentioned in virtually all accounts of coconut before AD 1500 and can thus be considered as part of the definition of coconut at that time. It is thus unreasonable to suppose that palms such as Attalea, Bactris or Elaeis were misidentified as coconut. In fact, palms of these and other genera were described as distinct ‘kinds’ by Oviedo, and their nuts were described as comparable to a coconut, but “the size of a walnut”, or “of a Seville olive” etc.
The second one is seed dissemination by oceanic currents, which is unique to coconut among palms. It was observed in the mouth of the Santa Maria river, southern from the old Spanish town of Nata. This used to be a bay which was converted into a salt works. The original population still exists in Aguadulce.
When and where was coconut first brought to America clearly remains an open question. BC 150 in the Bahia de Caraquez? AD 800 in the Gulf of Guayaquil? Or some other unidentified landing? We really don’t know but it was clearly before the Spaniards arrived. One may hesitate to admit it because of the extremely long distance from the Philippines to the American coasts, but it’s a fact. Hugh mentioned the presence of coconuts of the San Ramon type in Guam and this could contribute to ease the problem. It would be a two-leg journey.
In this context, the question of survival should be taken in the opposite way. While the Panama Tall can be described as an ‘incipient domesticate’, it did thrive at a small number of locations on the Pacific coasts of America. This shows that it did not lose its ability to propagate itself without human help (but in the absence of competitors that are more adapted to long distance dissemination).
I am talking of the Pacific coast of Panama. As regards Mexico and the Caribbean, I agree with Hugh.