- Metabarcoding of poop reveals secret of large herbivore diversity in African savannahs.
- Unique Omani banana fights pests.
- Truffle dogs: “Il cane, le corna non te le mette mai…”
- Traditional taro cultivation protects Hawaiian reef.
- Organic farming pays.
- Climate change favouring offspring of interspecies hybridization. Also in crops? Like brassicas maybe?
- Domestication of silk worm probed molecularly. Is that even a word?
- Video explains Baranaja. Spoiler alert: it’s the diversity, stupid.
- And along the same lines: rare seeds go home.
- Brazil wants to be among the top 5 fish producers in the world. What could possibly go wrong.
- Extracts from Jules Pretty’s book on what we can all learn from more nature-loving societies.
- The key to Inga conservation. Is keys.
- Community-based forest management in the Yucatan: “Future generations have the right to know them.” And not just the trees, bees too.
- Since we’re in Mexico: a visit to the genebank.
- The women of beer. None of them using cassava, though, alas.
- “El mercado tiene sus normas y los científicos no las conocemos”.
- Agro-commodity traders can be good for you. Somebody mention the market?
Nibbles: Regreening, Dog & chicken domestication, Genebanks, Banana hybrids, Orange maize, IFPRI
Nibbles: Biofortification, NUS, Wakehurst Place, Cheesy map, Seeds2Zim, Food bibliography, Eucalypt genome, Oregano in the US, CFC, Rotations, Malaria drugs, Quinoa in Colorado, Pacific pineapple, Rhubarb event, Mango festival, Araucaria, American chestnut, Potato casserole, Coffee breeding, Tulips galore, George Harrison Shull, Seed saving, Chinese agriculture, European agroforestry, Eat This Podcast
- Webinar on biofortification, today.
- Book on Asian underutilized plant species, which we somehow missed when it came out in 2014. Unless it didn’t.
- The Millennium Seed Bank isn’t just great in and of itself, it also sits in a wonderful garden: the man who has been keeping that going for the past decade has just retired. Best wishes!
- A map of French cheese. Internet surrenders.
- North Jersey donates organic seeds to Zimbabwe. In related news, they also sending coals to Newcastle.
- Online bibliography of food history. There goes the morning.
- All hail the eucalyptuzzzzz genome.
- The unintended consequences of WW2: oregano.
- Follow the construction of the Crops for the Future Centre HQ. Over 10 episodes, mind, so gird your loins.
- Breaking down crop rotation.
- Malaria drugs through the ages. Make mine a G&T.
- Yes, how is quinoa doing in Colorado?
- New pineapples for the Pacific. They’ll probably end up canned.
- Good news: Clumber Park has a Rhubarb Weekend. Bad news: we missed it. Ditto the Goa Mango Festival.
- Mapping every monkey puzzle tree in Britain. Well, someone has to.
- Transgenic chestnuts taking over New York State. You can bet someone’s going to map them.
- The US potato renaissance we all knew was happening finally hits the headlines.
- The latest on coffee improvement, including news from the CATIE collections.
- Tulipmania: The video.
- The father of hybrid corn.
- Would he have approved of saving seeds? I suspect yes.
- Chinese agriculture adds a few (thousand) years.
- Europe has agroforestry too, and lots of it.
- Think I missed something? Check if Jeremy caught it in his Tasty Morsels.
Brainfood: Tomato diversity, Tomato characterization, Sweetpotato diversity, Olive characterization, Bamboo as fodder, Chinese liquor, Agroecological livestock, Oasis agrobiodiversity, Pearl millet diversity double
- Genomic variation in tomato, from wild ancestors to contemporary breeding accessions. A first domestication in South America, a second step in Mesoamerica, occasional hybridization in the wild, differentiation through human selection. Some Ecuadorian and Peruvian diversity still unexplored for breeding.
- Characterization of a collection of local varieties of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) using conventional descriptors and the high-throughput phenomics tool Tomato Analyzer. Instant gratification comes to tomato characterization.
- Molecular diversity and genetic structure of 380 sweetpotato accessions as revealed by SSR markers. Also a two-step domestication history? What are the odds?
- Association of SSR markers with contents of fatty acids in olive oil and genetic diversity analysis of an olive core collection. Let the molecular-assisted breeding begin.
- Genetic Evaluation of Nutritional and Fodder Quality of Different Bamboo Species. Remarkably, some species are ok.
- Genetic Diversity Among the Microorganisms in Daqu Used for Beidacang Liquor as Revealed by RAPD Analyses. Well that’s a new one on me, but it’s good to have the data.
- Farm animal genetic and genomic resources from an agroecological perspective. If you’re going to really be ecological in your management of livestock genetic resources, you need to factor in ecosystem services, and figure out how genomic tools are going to help you. Well, that pretty much goes for crops too, surely.
- The labor of agrodiversity in a Moroccan oasis. Not all agrobiodiversity is that old.
- Identification of pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.) germplasm with unique popping quality in the national genebank collections of India. Amazing what you can find in genebanks.
- Iniadi pearl millet germplasm as a valuable genetic resource for high grain iron. See what I mean?
All sweetpotatoes are transgenic
Tina Kyndta and collaborators 1 have found that all cultivated sweetpotatoes are naturally transgenic because they contain transfer DNA (T-DNA) sequences from Agrobacterium. Gene-transfer via Agrobacterium is a naturally occurring process, that is used to make genetically modified crops in the lab. We did not know that one of our main food crops was once naturally transformed via the same process.
Kyndta et al. did not find any T-DNA in the wild relatives of sweetpotato, suggesting that the transformation(s) provided a beneficial trait that was selected for during domestication. The introduced genes are intact and expressed in different organs of the “Huachano” variety that they studied in detail, but we’ll have to wait for future expression studies to find out about the benefit of these paleo-GMOs.
The authors also suggest that, as people have been eating these swollen roots for millennia, we might now consider all transgenic crops to be “natural”. I don’t know about that. Didn’t most of these people suffer and die young? I predict that sweetpotato consumption will plummet now that the word is out.