- 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.
Brainfood: Wheat elements, Coconut movement, Wild lettuce, Pacific yams, Wild VIR oats, PREDICTS, Potato leaves, Perennial wheat, Wheat adoption
- Genetic Nature of Elemental Contents in Wheat Grains and Its Genomic Prediction: Toward the Effective Use of Wheat Landraces from Afghanistan. Only one significant marker, for Zn.
- Strategies for exchange of coconut germplasm in Brazil. Zygotic embryos in Petri dish containing Y3 culture medium without sucrose can last a couple of days without bacterial infection.
- Phylogenetic relationships within Lactuca L. (Asteraceae), including African species, based on chloroplast DNA sequence comparisons. The African species are probably not Lactuca at all.
- The Pacific yam (Dioscorea nummularia Lam.), an under-exploited tuber crop from Melanesia. It can be improved through crossing with itself, or with other species.
- Eco-geographical assessment of Avena L. wild species at the VIR herbarium and genebank collection. Some more collecting to be done.
- The database of the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) project. Including 15,000 plants. No word on whether any of them Avena.
- Your Poison in My Pie—the Use of Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) Leaves in Sakartvelo, Republic of Georgia, Caucasus, and Gollobordo, Eastern Albania. Only used as first vegetable in spring in isolated high mountain areas in the southern Balkans.
- Toward a taxonomic definition of perennial wheat: a new species ×Tritipyrum aaseae described. Not entirely clear why naming it as a new species is necessary, but it’s still pretty cool.
- Dynamics of variety change on wheat farms in Pakistan: A duration analysis. For marginal farmers, it’s about yield, for others, quality. No word on how perennial wheat might do.
Coconut history 102
Yesterday’ post by Hugh Harries on the recent article in AramcoWord entitled Cracking Coconut’s History, by Ramin Ganeshram, elicited this response from another coconut expert, Luc Baudouin, on the coconut google group.
I enjoyed reading the [article], especially the picture from Dioscorides’s Tractatus De Herbis, a 15th Century manuscript. Congratulations to the author. While I share several of Hugh’s comments, I beg to differ as regards the presence of coconut on the Pacific coast of America. Several travellers mention its presence and provide multiple evidence. I will mention only two diagnostic traits.
The first one is simply that coconut has huge fruits, unparalleled among palms (except for Lodoicea maldivica, known as… the sea coconut). That the coconut fruit is as big as a human head was mentioned in virtually all accounts of coconut before AD 1500 and can thus be considered as part of the definition of coconut at that time. It is thus unreasonable to suppose that palms such as Attalea, Bactris or Elaeis were misidentified as coconut. In fact, palms of these and other genera were described as distinct ‘kinds’ by Oviedo, and their nuts were described as comparable to a coconut, but “the size of a walnut”, or “of a Seville olive” etc.
The second one is seed dissemination by oceanic currents, which is unique to coconut among palms. It was observed in the mouth of the Santa Maria river, southern from the old Spanish town of Nata. This used to be a bay which was converted into a salt works. The original population still exists in Aguadulce.
When and where was coconut first brought to America clearly remains an open question. BC 150 in the Bahia de Caraquez? AD 800 in the Gulf of Guayaquil? Or some other unidentified landing? We really don’t know but it was clearly before the Spaniards arrived. One may hesitate to admit it because of the extremely long distance from the Philippines to the American coasts, but it’s a fact. Hugh mentioned the presence of coconuts of the San Ramon type in Guam and this could contribute to ease the problem. It would be a two-leg journey.
In this context, the question of survival should be taken in the opposite way. While the Panama Tall can be described as an ‘incipient domesticate’, it did thrive at a small number of locations on the Pacific coasts of America. This shows that it did not lose its ability to propagate itself without human help (but in the absence of competitors that are more adapted to long distance dissemination).
I am talking of the Pacific coast of Panama. As regards Mexico and the Caribbean, I agree with Hugh.