- All of BGCI’s ex situ surveys on one cool page. Have they re-modelled their website?
- Harvard’s glass flowers are totally cool.
- The world’s coolest trees.
- Rhubarb is cooler than you think.
- I’m not sure paying over a thousand pounds for a pumpkin seed is all that cool.
- Conventional breeding is cooler than genetic engineering. Cool quote of the week: “I tell my students they should drop acid before they go to the field, and just look at the plants and let them tell you what they are doing.”
- Is the coolness over for quinoa? Jeremy unavailable for comment.
- Cool Pakistani bug may help with citrus greening in the US. But don’t stop looking for resistance, y’all.
Blogging the olive plague
It was inevitable, I suppose. There’s now a whole blog dedicated to the “Diffusion of xylella in Italian olive trees.” The latest post comments on an article in Nature which seems to suggest things are beginning to move in normally sleepy Puglia, epicenter of the apocalypse. Here’s hoping. But I still think they should have put like a hundred varieties out for testing two years ago, when this whole thing first started.
A genebank in central Madrid
Had a nice afternoon out at the Real Jardín Botánico in Madrid last week, offspring in tow (who thankfully didn’t complain too much). It goes back to the late 18th century, and it’s beautifully laid out, and indeed located, though a cool and wet afternoon in early May did not show it off at its best. Anyway, there were a few nice wild Allium specimens out.
But what really caught my attention were the alley of local olive varieties…
…and, to a slightly lesser extent, the rows of local grapes.
I say “to a lesser extent” because some of the grape specimens seemed decidedly ropey to me. But maybe they’ll look better in the summer. Interestingly, the botanic garden does not feature in WIEWS as a genebank. Which it should, as it clearly is, and has been for a while, if the size of those olives is anything to go by.
Nibbles: GRIN-Global, Old gardens, Grain buildings, Roman eating, Armenian wine, Coffee GI, PAPGREN, Tamar Haspel double
- How to look for stuff in Chile’s genebank.
- How colonial Americans gardened. And later built stuff out of produce.
- How Romans ate.
- How Armenians are (still) making wine.
- How to figure out where your coffee comes from.
- How the Pacific is saving its crop diversity.
- How organic agriculture delivers benefits, and how it does not.
- How GMOs deliver benefits, and how they do not. By the same person as the above.
Brainfood: Banana GWAS, Yeast genebanks, Hybrid sorghum, How to intensify ecologically, Med pastures, Food services, Neolithic transition, Ploughing the savanna
- A Genome-Wide Association Study on the Seedless Phenotype in Banana (Musa spp.) Reveals the Potential of a Selected Panel to Detect Candidate Genes in a Vegetatively Propagated Crop. One strong candidate gene, from 6 possible regions. And here’s the light version.
- Yeast culture collections in the twenty-first century: New opportunities and challenges. Pretty much the same as plant genebanks.
- Genetic variation in sorghum as revealed by phenotypic and SSR markers: implications for combining ability and heterosis for grain yield. Possible parents for hybrids identified.
- Actionable knowledge for ecological intensification of agriculture. Look at the landscape, articulate trade-offs and don’t forget the social dynamics.
- Taxonomic and functional diversity in Mediterranean pastures: Insights on the biodiversity–productivity trade-off. Somebody mention trade-offs?
- Are the major imperatives of food security missing in ecosystem services research? Pretty much.
- Reproductive trade-offs in extant hunter-gatherers suggest adaptive mechanism for the Neolithic expansion. Agriculture got you laid, but then killed you.
- High carbon and biodiversity costs from converting Africa’s wet savannahs to cropland. Bad idea all round.