Category: Featured

Cary Fowler suggests a novel approach to developing policies for access and benefit sharing:

Rather than start with the policies we may instinctively love and want, this pedigree shows us that we should begin with what we want to achieve, such as flood-tolerant rice, work backwards from there, and ask ourselves what policies will be needed to achieve such this rice, or UG99-resistant wheat, or low-toxin lathyrus, or…

J. Giles Waines clarifies wheat domestication:

“World wide wheat species” do not descend from einkorn wheat Triticum monococcum (AmAm), first cultivated close by Gobekli. The source of the AuAu genome in BBAuAu tetraploid and BBAuAuDD hexaploid wheats is a wild diploid species, Triticum urartu, that was never cultivated as far as we know, nor domesticated. It does grow in the vicinity of Urfa, Turkey, and is more drought tolerant than einkorn. The source of the BB genome that provided the egg of the initial hybrid, and hence the extra genes for mitochondria and chloroplasts is thought to be an ancestor of present day Aegilops speltoides, which also grows near Urfa and Harran.

Eliseu wants to know more about past collecting in Bhutan:

I would be very interested to follow up the development of this case should someone have access to the mission reports and could shed some light on the main objectives, sampling strategies and findings of the collecting missions that took place in the country 30 years ago.

Our friend Xavier Scheldeman nails the passion flower problem:

While rather similar to Passiflora mollissima (now classified as Passiflora tripartita var. mollissima), the fruit in the picture actually is Passiflora tarminiana, a species that was only described in 2001 (by Geo Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge, who was working in Bioversity’s office for the Americas at that time).

Read the whole comment here.

Jeremy explains Luigi’s overly telegraphic post on seed longevity:

Laconic, possibly to a fault. The point being that Olivia Judson’s normally impeccable science-writing has failed her this once, but comments there are closed, so Luigi is taking the opportunity to set her straight here. If she notices …