Category: Featured

Marc Deletre clarifies that yam bean paper:

Yep, you’re right, the species’ names should be in the reverse order [in the abstract]. As it is it suggests that P. ahipa is the progenitor, but actually it’s the opposite.

Sometimes, you just have to read the whole paper.

KCTomato is in the mood to rant about breeding for flavour:

(Rant) My only concern is if entities do so based on financial gain and limit or prevent others from accessing such material or information in the future.

Thank you Stubbe, Rick and others for openly sharing material and having some fore sight that they were contributing and sharing something to be built on rather than a means to an end. (/Rant)

But not only rant, to be fair. Read the whole thing.

Cary also thinks we should do something about that 75% thing:

FAO has long needed to correct the record. Yes, it is like something generated from a game of “Chinese Whispers” as mentioned in one of your earlier posts. But hey, maybe it’s become a meme by now! What would Richard Dawkins have to say? I’m guessing he would wish you good luck in reeling this back toward reality, whatever that is.

Best meme gets a prize.

Paul Gepts, who should know, says that the bit of Mexico featured yesterday is pretty important:

This particular area of the state of Jalisco is part of the proposed Mesoamerican center of domestication of common bean (Kwak et al. 2009 Crop Sci.).

Here’s the relevant quote from that paper:

In the Mesoamerican gene pool, a single cluster groups most of the domesticated type, which confirms previous observations suggesting a single domestication located in the state of Jalisco form this gene pool (Gepts et al. 1986; Papa and Gepts 2003; Kwak et al. 2009).

Glenn is ready to take up our challenge on crop distribution mapping:

I suppose that you could use “big data” & machine learning to find individual crop patterns in all that data. I think that some people are doing this kind of thing, but it’s private sector stuff. The global crop maps rely too heavily on data from surveys and censuses, and all the problems that come with those in terms of standardizing across countries.

Kinda. Sorta.