- What does the ‘closed herd’ really mean for Australian breeding companies and their customers? Australia has enough pig diversity to be going on with.
- Crossbreeding East African Highland Bananas: Lessons Learnt Relevant to the Botany of the Crop After 21 Years of Genetic Enhancement. Not completely sterile, but hardly very fertile either. Hard row to hoe.
- Are we eating the world’s megafauna to extinction? Yes.
- A systematic map of evidence on the contribution of forests to poverty alleviation. Always like a map.
- Turismo Rural y Conservación Ambiental: La Participación de la Mujer Campesina en la Reserva de la Biosfera los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, Mexico. It would be a good idea.
- Not even wrong: The spurious measurement of biodiversity’s effects on ecosystem functioning. Biodiversity likely not as important for ecosystem productivity as previously thought, because maths.
- Evolution of SSR diversity from wild types to U.S. advanced cultivars in the Andean and Mesoamerican domestications of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). Some base-broadening may be called for.
- Comparison of Methods to Distinguish Diploid and Tetraploid Potato in Applied Diploid Breeding. Count chloroplasts.
- Phenotyping Whole Forests Will Help to Track Genetic Performance. You heard.
- Signatures of positive selection in African Butana and Kenana dairy zebu cattle. Adapted to marginal environments, but with potential for higher milk production.
- How cultivating wild plants in botanic gardens can change their genetic and phenotypic status and what it means for their conservation value. In the end, it’s a numbers game.
- Genetic Resources of Capsicum. Could use more wild relatives, more.
- Vanilla bahiana, a contribution from the Atlantic Forest biodiversity for the production of vanilla: A proteomic approach through high-definition nanoLC/MS. But does it taste the same?
- Spontaneous hybridisation within Aegilops collection and biobanking of crop wild relatives (CWR). I guess that’s bad. But could it be useful?
Nibbles: Homeric food, Two atlases, Cacao breeding, Smart foods, Lancet/EAT, Wild grapes, Landrace maize, Training breeders, Apios, Sustainable use, Cost of nutrition
- Did Homeric heroes eat a lot of meat? The answer will surprise you. A thread.
- Social food atlas to be launched.
- Atlas of West African food systems already launched. Very different thing.
- Saving chocolate through biotech.
- What makes foods smart?
- Pros and cons of the Lancet/EAT thing. And more.
- Waking up the wine industry to the beauty grapevine wild relatives.
- The magos of maize, from Mexico to the US, and back again.
- Plant breeding training in Africa.
- Pre-colonial North America: not wilderness, not dense forest, and not just the Three Sisters, lots of Apios too. Lots.
- Food AND biodiversity.
- Nutritious OR affordable.
Nibbles: Fox burials, Myammar genebank, Wild rice, Community genebanks, Breeding cowpeas & EAH bananas, Doherty pics, Pulque ecotourism, Tree diversity maps, Horizontal genes, Polish hop breeding
- Did ancient Iberians domesticate foxes?
- Myanmar genebank staff receive training in Australia.
- Why genebanks are important. Though not so much for wild rice. No, not that wild rice, we’re talking Zizania here.
- Genebanks can be community-friendly.
- Improving cowpea and banana. Need genebanks for that.
- Picturing genebanks.
- Drinking for conservation.
- Mapping tree diversity.
- Some grasses steal genes from neighbours.
- Polish hops for Polish beer.
Brainfood: Improvement recapitulates domestication, Functional variation, Intensification, Gender & nutrition, Collaboration double, Losses, AgRenSeq , Crocus domestication, Saffron evolution, Mascarene CWR, Mexican CWR, ABS, Sweet cocoa, Tasty fruits, Baobab diversity
- How can developmental biology help feed a growing population? By figuring out how domestication hacked developmental processes.
- Distinct characteristics of genes associated with phenome-wide variation in maize (Zea mays). Analyzing a lot of traits at a time identifies a different set of phenotypically causal genes than more conventional single-trait approaches. What it all means in practice I have no idea, you tell me.
- Sunflower pan-genome analysis shows that hybridization altered gene content and disease resistance. Not only is one trait not enough, one genome is not enough.
- Agriculturally productive yet biodiverse: human benefits and conservation values along a forest-agriculture gradient in Southern Ethiopia. Depends what you mean by productive.
- Does providing agricultural and nutrition information to both men and women improve household food security? Evidence from Malawi. Yes.
- Principles of effective collaboration in agricultural development and research for impact. Learn from the birds.
- Opening the dialogue: Research networks between high‐ and low‐income countries further understanding of global agro‐climatic challenges. See above. Maybe.
- The global burden of pathogens and pests on major food crops. About 20%. We talked about this…
- Resistance gene cloning from a wild crop relative by sequence capture and association genetics. A new way to reduce the above, using crop wild relatives.
- Adding color to a century‐old enigma: multi‐color chromosome identification unravels the autotriploid nature of saffron (Crocus sativus) as a hybrid of wild Crocus cartwrightianus cytotypes. Which means you can now re-synthesize it.
- Crop wild relative diversity and conservation planning in two isolated oceanic islands of a biodiversity hotspot (Mauritius and Rodrigues). Basically coffee.
- Diversity and conservation priorities of crop wild relatives in Mexico. Over 300 species, but not coffee.
- Benefit sharing mechanisms for agricultural genetic diversity use and on-farm conservation. Profit-sharing is better for conservation than technology transfer.
- Are Cocoa Farmers in Trinidad Happy? Exploring Factors Affecting their Happiness. Well, those whose main crop was not cacao are happier, which must say something.
- Edible fruits from Brazilian biodiversity: A review on their sensorial characteristics versus bioactivity as tool to select research. Eat Anacardium occidentale, Passiflora edulis and Acrocomia aculeata to be happiest. Seems very unadventurous, though.
- Genetic differentiation in leaf phenology among natural populations of Adansonia digitata L. follows climatic clines. Anyone going to do this for all those Brazilian fruits?
Nibbles: Open data, Banana virus, Potato impact, Peruvian agrobiodiversity, Malagasy Coffea, Evolution experiment, A2S
- “It’s embarrassing if your lab is the only one that isn’t sharing data.” One would hope so, but…
- CRISPR snips out virus from banana genome.
- CIP-related potato varieties are planted on about 1.43 Mha, or 19% of total area.
- Saving Peru’s agricultural biodiversity is more than just about markets.
- I suspect the same is the case for Madagascar’s wild coffees.
- Studying evolution experimentally. Using mice. Plants would have been cooler.
- More on Access to Seeds Index: “Seeds of Nope” seems unnecessarily negative, though.