Category: Featured

Vernon Heywood on Assisting crop wild relatives:

Moving species into new environments is … a contentious issue and may involve considerable risks. It is a complex issue involving not just scientific, technical and economic but sociological and ethical considerations. It requires a sound and well thought out policy framework before it is widely undertaken as a management response to global change but might be prove to be appropriate in a number of high priority species such as CWR of major crops.

Who else is doing the thinking? And where?

Carla Barber, from Canada’s National Research Council Plant Biotechnology Institute, offers a glimpse of the genebank database that will be launched in about a month:

The seed database … supports searching of various scientific data associated with each seed line such as Agronomic, Biochemical, Phenotypic, Genetic, Proteomic, Structural, Publications, as well as the option to integrate more Data Categories in the future.

Do you believe in Heaven?

Jacob, on Agrobiodiversity everywhere:

Other world maps of commodity flows: Fertilizers; Sugar; Vegetables; Cotton; Flowers; Coffee and cocoa. The information is a bit dated, but the maps are cool.

Michael Bell on Frankia and Alnus:

I have started a truly wild project – developing alder as a grain crop! <snip> I would be very grateful for living material, cuttings or seeds. If the place where trees which meet my needs can be described, I can go and get it myself. The plan is to copy the “Open Source” ideas of Linux and similar computer systems. All those who contribute material will be offered the results of my work.

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From Jacob, on Gates speaks:

Has anyone ever quantified how geo-diverse Africa is? And compared it with, say, Latin America or Asia?

Well? Has anyone?