- Mexico embraces moringa against malnutrition.
- Get your mushroom spores here. (You’ll need something for the headache the page induces.)
- Scientist Gardener discovers blue potato chips at altitude.
- GRAIN gets altNobel. It’s not the winning. It’s the being nominated.
- Bioversity stuns world with nutrition strategy. While Jess does poo.
- Damn, looks like we missed National Maize Day again.
- How your United Sorghum Checkoff dollars are being spent.
Nibbles: Maize, David Douglas, Globesity, Iron-rice rice, Miracle berry, Trout vs cows
- Farmer Brian Schaumburg has planted corn for five straight years in some of the thousands of acres he tends in central Illinois. Good thinking; it’s non-native, and it’s a monoculture.
- Douglas of the Douglas Fir remembered.
- Tom tackles “globesity“.
- Enriching rice with iron and zinc using rice’s own genes. Because they can.
- How Richadella dulcifica works its miracles.
- In the contest between fish and bovine, the outcome is not always certain.
Nibbles: Primary forests, Lima Declaration
- “…old-growth rainforests are the greatest celebration of life on earth.” Well, maybe.
- Chefs make a stand. Ooooooh, scary.
Brainfood: Millet diversity, Maize landraces and hybrids, Potato carotenoids, Wheat domestication, Value chains, Population modeling, Rhizobium diversity, Yeast diversity, Core collection, Wild Zea, Cotton geneflow, Forest fires, Forest diseases
- Identification of trait-specific germplasm and developing a mini core collection for efficient use of foxtail millet genetic resources in crop improvement. All the goodness of Setaria italica diversity in just 35 accessions.
- Farmers’ adoption of maize (Zea mays L.) hybrids and the persistence of landraces in Southwest China: implications for policy and breeding. There are pros and cons to both hybrids and landraces, and participatory plant breeding could bring together the pros and get rid of the cons.
- Carotenoid concentrations of native Andean potatoes as affected by cooking. Some carotenoids were decreased by boiling, others not so much.
- Domestication evolution, genetics and genomics in wheat. A big summary of what we know so far and what we might learn by sequencing some wild wheat relatives.
- Research Principles for Developing Country Food Value Chains. Multidimensional demands by consumers demand multidimensional research by scientists. I think.
- Range shift promotes the formation of stable range edges. Species can move for reasons other than climate change.
- Genetic diversity of rhizobia associated with indigenous legumes in different regions of Flanders (Belgium). A new genus? In Flanders?
- Assessment of yeast diversity in soils under different management regimes. Type of management and vegetation has an effect. Yeah, well, you had to be there.
- Efficiency of PowerCore in core set development using amplified fragment length polymorphic markers in mungbean. Software for making core collections seems to work.
- Three new teosintes (Zea spp., Poaceae) from México. New entities, apparently. Species? Subspecies? More study needed, natch.
- Recent long-distance transgene flow into wild populations conforms to historical patterns of gene flow in cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) at its centre of origin. Four out of eight populations have transgenes.
- Effectiveness of strict vs. multiple use protected areas in reducing tropical forest fires: A global analysis using matching methods. Indigenous areas and multiple use are best.
- The sudden emergence of pathogenicity in insect–fungus symbioses threatens naive forest ecosystems. It can happen anywhere, any time.
Nibbles: Blé tendre, Colloquium, Kenyan veg, Sharing vs Sparing, Rice, Tomatillos, Walnuts
- Attention, francophones! Quels indicateurs pour suivre la diversité génétique des plantes cultivées? Le cas du blé tendre cultivé en France depuis un siècle.
- Et un colloque on how genetic resources respond to new environmental, economic and societal issues.
- Award for Kenyan vegetable enthusiast Prof. Mary Abukutsa.
- An in-depth look at land-sharing versus land sparing.
- “The age of the ‘mega-varieties’ [of rice] may be over.” Say it isn’t so, Joe!
- What to do with tomatillos, apart from salsa, that is.
- What to do with ancient walnuts, or rather, walnut tree forests. Save them, obviously.