Category: Fruits and nuts

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Boffins unravel mandarins

I was just going to include the paper Diversification of mandarin citrus by hybrid speciation and apomixis in a forthcoming Brainfood, but the very different approaches taken in the two articles on the paper that I have seen convinced me to give it a bit more space.

The piece in The Packer has very much the industry take, and highlights the contribution of the University of Florida authors: this new information will make breeding easier, including to fight citrus greening.

On the other hand, the press release from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology makes much more of how the paper unravels the origin of shiikuwasha and tachibana, which are culturally important citrus fruits in Japan, though not very significant economically.

Something for everyone.

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Nibbles: Training materials double, Tree platform double, Wild rabbit, Economic value

  1. Crawford Fund training materials for high schools include discussion of genebanks.
  2. And that would go quite well with this graphic novel on natural selection in Mimulus from Health in Our Hands.
  3. There’s a Global Tree Knowledge Platform from ICRAF…
  4. …which could probably be usefully mashed up with the restoration platform Restor.
  5. The Sumatran striped rabbit makes a rare appearance. On Facebook.
  6. The World Bank makes the economic case for all of the above. Well, maybe except the Sumatran rabbit.
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Nibbles: Black sheep, Salty rice, Spanish melons, Olive diversity, Food sculpture, Seed art, Navajo peaches, Grain amaranth, PNG yams, Avocado recipes, Abbasid cooking

  1. Just back from a nice holiday, and greeted by Jeremy’s latest newsletter, which includes, among many delights, a post from Old European Culture on black sheep in the Balkans.
  2. Traditional salt-tolerant rice varieties making a comeback in India.
  3. Traditional melon varieties exhibited by genebank in Spain.
  4. Trying to make the most of traditional olive varieties.
  5. Traditional foods are depicted in stone on Seville’s cathedral.
  6. And more recent attempts to celebrate biodiversity in art.
  7. I guess one could call traditional these old peaches that used to be grown by the Navajo. Have blogged about them before, check it out.
  8. No doubt that amaranth is a traditional crop in Central America. I doubt that it will “feed the world,” but it can certainly feed a whole bunch more people. Thanks to people like Roxanne Swentzell.
  9. There’s nothing more traditional than yams in Papua New Guinea. For 50,000 years.
  10. How to remix a traditional food like stuffed avocado.
  11. How many of the traditional recipes in these Abbasid and later Arab cookbooks have been remixed, I wonder?