- How can you do Eggplant’s Rich History and not wonder why this generally huge, generally purple thing is called an eggplant?
- Domestication of the Gray Ghost Organ Pipe cactus; exceedingly complex. Oh and there’s a cool photo here.
- How berries protect the brain from age-related malfunction. Are you listening, Dmitry?
- Protect medicinal plants, says letter-writer.
- The world doesn’t understand drought tolerance, says another letter-writer.
- Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica conference.
- Chaffey’s Plant Cuttings from Annals of Botany. Must-read stuff.
- A wild relative contributes trait for early morning flowering to rice, allowing it to escape sterility induced by high temperatures.
- The Cornelian Cherry and the Baobab explained.
- Voice of America devotes Special English report to Pavlovsk. If that ain’t viral, what is?
- Genebanks on a roll in China. In Australia, not so much.
- Dam dataset online. Let the mashups proliferate.
Fruit diversity in SE Europe
Fuad Gasi tells us about an interesting effort to document the diversity of fruits in the former Yugoslavia.
A new regional collaboration between the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences, University of Sarajevo and the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Zagreb has been established in the field of fruit (including Vitis) genetic resources. This collaboration is being strengthened through the SEEDNet project (South East European Network on Plant Genetic Resources) financed by SIDA (Swedish International Development Agency). So far, we have had a publication on apple genetic resources in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a result of this collaboration. We are currently preparing a similar publication on plum genetic resources that will present results of a study made on autochthonous plums from B&H, Croatia and Serbia, focusing mainly on different synonyms of Pozegaca, but not exclusively (molecular and morphological data, as well as some food processing qualities). Similar work has been done on the chestnut and is currently being done on the pear.
Nibbles: Iron beans, Tomatoes, Fruit, Africa college
- Learn about iron beans from a HarvestPlus video, maybe.
- Learn about the tomato in Ghana, more than you might need to know if you read all the reports.
- Learn how Andy Jarvis spoke truth to ex-power, about fruit data gathering project prospects.
- Learn how the Africa College, based at Leeds University in the UK, is working on a range of agricultural problems.
Nibbles: CGIAR “change”, Cuba, Data, Pavlovsk, Homegardens, Soil bacteria, Thai rice
- GFAR publishes list of Megaprogramme (or whatever they are called) consultations.
- Cuba’s Miscellaneous Crops Under-delegate Rolando Macias Cardenas reports on tomato paste. In other news, Cuba has a Miscellaneous Crops Under-delegate. No, wait, that’s not really news.
- While Sachs et al. moan about better agricultural data, CIAT go out and get it.
- The Pavlovsk TweetMedvedev campaign rolls on.
- “…maximum diversity can be conserved at an intermediate level of income” in Javanese bamboo-tree homegardens.
- Right, so trees “farm” bacteria. What some people will write in a press release.
- Thailand’s rice farmers trying to cope with climate change. Like they have a choice.
Not the world’s first red apple
Of course it is tiresome for you, Dear Reader, to have to wade through me correcting the mainstream media, but when duty calls I am powerless to refuse.
The BBC was all breathless a couple of days ago with news of a new apple variety on sale in England that has red flesh. Oooh. Ah. It’s like a tomato! And a large chunk of the little report was taken up by the breeder explaining that no GM was involved, just 15 years of crosses and selection and 20,000 seedlings rejected in favour of three that made the grade as worthwhile varieties. ((How long before somebody says, “well, it would have been much quicker, cheaper, easier,” to do it by GM or at least marker-assisted selection?))
What really struck me, though, was not the utter imbecility of the reporter, or even what the bloody apple looked like. It was the fact that nobody had seemed to ask whether this was in fact the world’s first red-fleshed apple, as reported by FOXNews and The Daily Mail. ((Yeah, yeah. I know. Fish in a barrel.)) It isn’t that there are some wild red-fleshed apples out there, and this is the first one that’s good to eat. There have even been a fair number of commercial, good to eat, red-fleshed varieties. It’s just that reporters swallow rubbish so uncomplainingly. Google is your friend.
The photo (by Kayirkul Shalpykov, Bioresource, and lifted from the Living on Earth website) is of “Niedzwetzky apples (malus niedzwetzkyana), famous for their red flesh. There are 111 known trees left in the world”. Not sure I believe that either.