- Telegraph op-ed on agricultural biodiversity. Yeah, you read that right.
- No, avocado does not come from the Aztec’s word for testicles. It’s the other way around.
- Why honey is a keeper.
- Mapping the hell out of pigs.
- Photo database to help tell bananas apart.
- Deconstructing the Tragedy of the Commons.
- The C footprint of your diet.
- “We can spare 50 percent and share the rest.”
- Cave man caviar.
- Whiskey with that?
- Potato wild relatives and food security.
- Cassava and food security. No word on its wild relatives.
- Wales finds a new apple.
- Maybe someone will take a cool picture of it.
- Potatoes were always for the masses. Ok, but not sure anyone ever thought otherwise, though.
- Grapes, on the other hand…
- The cuisines of Africa get their shot.
- Some of those will go well with craft beer.
- Agricultural heritage list gets saffron and argan. Bet they go together well.
- Maybe wild kiang tea will get there too someday.
- Or the Aboriginal Australians. Not really agriculturalists, but still.
- Is this alpaca exploitation? Maybe you can take the promotion of agricultural biodiversity too far.
- Will the Svalbard Global Seed Vault qualify one day? Ten years on, still going strong. And return to top.
Brainfood: Stressful crops, Quinoa, Ganja genome, Medicinal vetch, CWR in PAs, CWR in Zambian farms, African viral chickens, Naked barley, Farmer trials, Cotton genomes, Tuscan toms, Land sharing, Nigerian goats, Walnut diversity, Bean breeders, Sweet rice
- Developing naturally stress-resistant crops for a sustainable agriculture. Can’t help thinking there will be a trade-off.
- Quinoa Abiotic Stress Responses: A Review. Case in point?
- A physical and genetic map of Cannabis sativa identifies extensive rearrangement at the 2 THC/CBD acid synthase locus. At last, the prospect of better weed.
- In vitro anthelmintic effect of Vicia pannonica var. purpurascens on trichostrongylosis in sheep. From Turkish folk medicine to the big time?
- Should plant breeders be denied of genetic resources from protected areas? Not if you put it that way. Maybe they should be valued? There’s a way to do that…
- Estimating in situ conservation costs of Zambian crop wild relatives under alternative conservation goals. Put it out to tender.
- The genetic diversity of local african chickens: A potential for selection of chickens resistant to viral infections. No word on their monetary value, though.
- Agro-morphological diversity of Nepalese naked barley landraces. Lots of diversity, little used as yet by breeders.
- Generating Farm-Validated Variety Recommendations for Climate Adaptation. One word: tricot.
- Reference genome sequences of two cultivated allotetraploid cottons, Gossypium hirsutum and Gossypium barbadense. 13 QTLs for better fibre quality.
- Ancient Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) Varieties of Tuscany Have High Contents of Bioactive Compounds. Better than commercial varieties, apparently.
- Biodiversity and yield under different land-use types in orchard/vineyard landscapes: A meta-analysis. Land sharing works.
- Small Ruminants as a Source of Financial Security Among Women in Rural Southwest Nigeria. Better with education, extension and cooperation.
- Analysis of genetic diversity and structure in a worldwide walnut (Juglans regia L.) germplasm using SSR markers. W Europe/N America vs E Europe/Asia.
- David Bond and Jean Picard: Two pivotal breeders of faba bean in the 20th century. Bond and Picard?
- Status and factors influencing on-farm conservation of Kam Sweet Rice (Oryza sativa L.) genetic resources in southeast Guizhou Province, China. In the end of women and the old.
Brainfood: Conservation indicator, Asian diversity, Sorghum QTLs, Wheat & barley evolution, Nematode detection, Gut microbiome, IBPGR base collection, Speed breeding, Pigeonpeas double, Dingo genetics, Wild tea, Yam anthracnose, Global land use change, Tree breeding double
- Comprehensiveness of conservation of useful wild plants: An operational indicator for biodiversity and sustainable development targets. Lots to do. Lots.
- The East Asiatic region of crop plant diversity. Southwest China especially rich, with its 44 species of kiwifruit, for example.
- The Sorghum QTL Atlas: a powerful tool for trait dissection, comparative genomics and crop improvement. Maybe this will get the stuff used a bit more.
- Domestication and crop evolution of wheat and barley: Genes, genomics, and future directions. Much progress recently, but high-resolution identification of crop-wild introgressions remains a gap.
- Real-time PCR, a great tool for fast identification, sensitive detection and quantification of important plant-parasitic nematodes. Results in 3 hours.
- Gut microbiome transition across a lifestyle gradient in Himalaya. Composition (but not diversity) can change in a generation when foragers transition to agriculture.
- Are the old International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR) base collections available through the Plant Treaty’s multilateral system of access and benefit sharing? A review. Well, about 80% of them may be.
- Speed breeding in growth chambers and glasshouses for crop breeding and model plant research. Hacking the breeders’ equation: one giant leap…
- The drivers and methodologies for exploiting wild Cajanus genome in pigeonpea breeding. Sources of high protein, CMS, self-pollination, and resistances to various biotic stresses; but may need to rethink the secondary genepool.
- Development and Application of High-Density Axiom Cajanus SNP Array with 56K SNPs to Understand the Genome Architecture of Released Cultivars and Founder Genotypes. Top 6 founders accounted for 50% of the genetic base of released cultivars. Could use more of the above, in other words.
- Genomic analysis of dingoes identifies genomic regions under reversible selection during domestication and feralization. They’re reverting to wolves, genetically speaking.
- Hongyacha, a Naturally Caffeine-Free Tea Plant from Fujian, China. Well, wild tea relative anyway.
- An EST-SSR based genetic linkage map and identification of QTLs for anthracnose disease resistance in water yam (Dioscorea alata L.). One QTL looks promising.
- Global assessment and mapping of changes in mesoscale landscapes: 1992–2015. Main changes were forest→agriculture, followed by agriculture→forest.
- Quantitative Genetics and Genomics Converge to Accelerate Forest Tree Breeding. Great potential, on the brink, just around the corner…
- Genome Editing in Trees: From Multiple Repair Pathways to Long-Term Stability. Great potential, on the brink, just around the corner…
Brainfood: ART, Rice diversity double, ABS, Spanish beans, Crop protection, Almond sex, Biotourism, Alpine meadows, Wheat treble, Baobab products, Wild Brassica, Cappello del prete pumpkin, Strawberry fields forever, Cassava seed networks, Indonesian chickens got talent
- Andean roots and tubers crops as sources of functional foods. Tasty too.
- Development of species diagnostic SNP markers for quality control genotyping in four rice (Oryza L.) species. About 3% misclassification in the AfricaRice genebank.
- Analysis of population structure and genetic diversity reveals gene flow and geographic patterns in cultivated rice (O. sativa and O. glaberrima) in West Africa. Natural NERICA. Hopefully this was done after the above.
- Conserving Genetic Resources, Access and Benefit-Sharing, Intellectual Property and Climate Change. It’s complicated. Too complicated.
- The Spanish Core Collection of Common Beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.): An Important Source of Variability for Breeding Chemical Composition. The white ones may be better nutritionally. Opportunities to breed for better nutrition AND taste.
- The Future of Sustainable Crop Protection Relies on Increased Diversity of Cropping Systems and Landscapes. The efficacy of chemistry is decreasing.
- Cross-incompatibility in the cultivated almond (Prunus dulcis): Updating, revision and correction. As most cultivars self-incompatible, you need this information if you want to do any conservation and breeding, let alone actually produce almonds.
- Global relationships between biodiversity and nature-based tourism in protected areas. The ideal protected area for tourism is very biodiverse, old, large, near a city and on top of a mountain. Same for agritourism?
- Biodiversity-based payments on Swiss alpine pastures. You get more money if you graze smaller, more diverse herds.
- Identification of new sources of resistance to wheat stem rust in Aegilops spp. in the tertiary genepool of wheat. 60% of 1400 very wild accessions with no genomes in common with cultivated wheat showed low infection.
- Mapping of QTL associated with seed longevity in durum wheat (Triticum durum Desf.). How long before we tailor seed testing and regeneration intervals to accession genotype?
- Breeding durum wheat for agroforestry: what to look for? Isn’t nature wonderful?
- Consumer Preferences for Baobab Products and Implication for Conservation and Improvement Policies of Forest Food Resources in Niger (West Africa). You could charge a little more and use the money for conservation.
- Adaptive significance of functional germination traits in crop wild relatives of Brassica. Could tap wild species for more consistent germination under future rainfed conditions.
- Morphological characterisation of Cucurbita maxima Duchesne (Cucurbitaceae) landraces from the Po Valley (Northern Italy). Who needs DNA?
- Domestication of Temperate and Coastal Hybrids with Distinct Ancestral Gene Selection in Octoploid Strawberry. The Californian, costal-adapted material is richer in alleles from the N. American parent and is quite distinct from the E. American and European material.
- Raising the Stakes: Cassava Seed Networks at Multiple Scales in Cambodia and Vietnam. Self-saved seed dominates, but not completely, with traders important especially in high-intensity cultivation areas.
- Knowledge and perception of pelung keepers’s toward chicken contests in West Java, Indonesia. In other news, Indonesia has singing contests for chickens.
Nibbles: Jackson on Vavilov, ICRAF genebank, #Imaginenopotatoes, Eye in the sky, Food system, Brazilian fruit singer, Fruit pix, Livestock data
- Mike Jackson reminisces about 50 years in plant genetic resources.
- Cracking story about taking a crack at cracking the problem of tree seeds.
- CIP asks you to imagine a world without potatoes.
- Satellites on the lookout for pests.
- The food system is broken. Or maybe it’s working just fine, to the wrong end.
- Singing about açaí.
- Pomology, illustrated.
- Livestock data, deconstructed.