- Nomadic ecology shaped the highland geography of Asia’s Silk Roads. Goat Roads doesn’t have the same ring to it.
- Agro-biodiversity has increased over a 95 year period at sub-regional and regional scales in southern Quebec, Canada. It’s all in the definition.
- Trees for life: The ecosystem service contribution of trees to food production and livelihoods in the tropics. Meta-analysis shows trees and forests are good for crop yields and livelihoods.
- Discovery and characterization of two new stem rust resistance genes in Aegilops sharonensis. Chipping away at Ug99.
- A study of allelic diversity underlying flowering-time adaptation in maize landraces. That’s a lot of genes.
- The challenges faced by living stock collections in the USA. Money, mainly.
- Low Genetic Differentiation and Evidence of Gene Flow among Barley Landrace Populations in Tunisia. One big happy family.
- Rethinking the approach to viability monitoring in seed genebanks. From germination tests to automated seed storage experiments.
- Evolution of Rosaceae Fruit Types Based on Nuclear Phylogeny in the Context of Geological Times and Genome Duplication. A story of whole genome duplications.
- Reconstructing the genome of the most recent common ancestor of flowering plants. The mother of all crop wild relatives, before all those duplications, has 23,000 genes and is 214 million years old.
- What Drives Deforestation and What Stops It? A Meta-Analysis. Money, and money, respectively.
Brainfood: Hot pepper double, Tibetan chickens, Watermelon diversity, Sunflower accessions, CWR meh, E Africa early ag, Pristine myth, African deforestation
- Screening old peppers (Capsicum spp.) for disease resistance and pungency-related traits. Resistance does not correlate with geography within an Andean collection.
- Bioactive Compound Variability in a Brazilian Capsicum Pepper Collection. No accession is high in everything.
- Genetic evidence from mitochondrial DNA corroborates the origin of Tibetan chickens. That is, the surrounding regions.
- Morphological and genetic diversity analysis of Citrullus landraces from India and their genetic inter relationship with continental watermelons. Modern cultivars are homogeneous.
- Molecular diversity of sunflower populations maintained as genetic resources is affected by multiplication processes and breeding for major traits. Multiplication slightly reduces within-accession diversity. Well, in France anyway.
- Past and Future Use of Wild Relatives in Crop Breeding. Yada yada.
- Subsistence mosaics, forager-farmer interactions, and the transition to food production in eastern Africa. The transition to agriculture in E Africa was more than just the Bantu expansion.
- Persistent effects of pre-Columbian plant domestication on Amazonian forest composition. Domesticated species are more common around archaeological sites. Sounds like agriculture is not much more than the Arawakan and Tupí expansions.
- Human population growth offsets climate-driven increase in woody vegetation in sub-Saharan Africa. In some places climate change has positive effects, but these are swamped where there is high population growth.
Brainfood: Arabidopsis refugia, Potato diversity, Palm uses, Coffee phylogeny, Traditional harvesting, Buckwheat trends, Maize double haploids, African cattle, Endophenotype
- On the post-glacial spread of human commensal Arabidopsis thaliana. A bit like Neanderthals.
- Exploration of the genetic diversity of cultivated potato and its wild progenitors (Solanum sect. Petota) with insights into potato domestication and genome evolution. Elite cultivars are a pretty diverse lot.
- Fundamental species traits explain provisioning services of tropical American palms. Bigger, more widespread species are more important to local people. Which means some useful things may be being missed.
- Genotyping-by-sequencing provides the first well-resolved phylogeny for coffee (Coffea) and insights into the evolution of caffeine content in its species: GBS coffee phylogeny and the evolution of caffeine content. Origin of the genus could be Africa. Or Asia. Or the Arabian Peninsula. So that narrows it down.
- A quiet harvest: linkage between ritual, seed selection and the historical use of the finger-bladed knife as a traditional plant breeding tool in Ifugao, Philippines. People kept old harvesting technology because it helped them show due reverence to the rice plant, and select seeds.
- Old Crop, New Society: Persistence and Change of Tartary Buckwheat Farming in Yunnan, China. It’s going down, but won’t disappear. No word on what’s happening to diversity though.
- Tapping the genetic diversity of landraces in allogamous crops with doubled haploid lines: a case study from European flint maize. The things people have to do to make use of landraces.
- Conservation of indigenous cattle genetic resources in Southern Africa’s smallholder areas: turning threats into opportunities — A review. We now the breeds, but not all their characteristics, and how to get the most out of them.
- The Importance of Endophenotypes to Evaluate the Relationship between Genotype and External Phenotype. Oh for pity’s sake, something else to worry about.
Nibbles: Meet a breeder, Radiation breeding, Cassava IK, Banana apocalypse, Chestnut doom & gloom, Crazy grafter, Crazy recombination, Obsidian sickle, Cat rug
- Meet a pumpkin breeder.
- Meet the history of atomic plant breeding.
- Meet a cassava anthropologist.
- Dial back the banana apocalypse stuff, banana guy says.
- On the other hand, the American chestnut apocalypse is all too real.
- A really wild pig.
- Grafting gone wild.
- Wild plants reveal a gene to speed plant breeding, someday.
- Beautiful Neolithic tools from the Sea of Galilee.
- And a beautiful, but slightly freaky, Egyptian rug. Made of cat hair.
Nibbles: Wheat rust, Coconut history, Svalbard, Cahokia, Millets, Politics, Crones & robots, Citrus history, Argan development
- Rust continues to never sleep.
- The discussion of whether there were coconuts on the Pacific coast of Panama prior to the Conquista continues on the Coconut Google Group.
- ICARDA and CIMMYT continue to love the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
- Climate change continues to be implicated in past societal collapses.
- NPR continues to plug those millets.
- Cautionary tale of Vavilov and Lysenko continues to be told, thankfully.
- The rise and rise of the drone continues. See what I did there?
- The relentless popular culture journey of citrus continues.
- And that of argan begins.