- The latest tropical forages newsletter.
- The Edens Bluff seed bag for your pleasure. You’re welcome.
- SciDev.net thinks Yemen is in North Africa. Anyway, be afraid.
- Umbu and licuri are helping Brazilian farmers. Yeah, I don’t know what they are either. IFAD wants you to google them, I guess.
- The Mutant Millet project is a name to conjure with.
- As is the VIII International Scientific and Practical Conference on Biotechnology as an Instrument for Plant Biodiversity Conservation (physiological, biochemical, embryological, genetic and legal aspects).
- Four ways nutrition is good for development. Only four?
- What gets a new tuber accepted? Now there’s a project to find out. Only now?
Nibbles: Svalbard, Irish Seed Savers Association podcast, Heirloom tomatoes, Rice genomes, Avocado history, 3D seeds, Agroforestry, Canarium development, IK, Indian nutrition, Biofortification, Salvia, Biorepositories best practices, Neurolathyrism
- The Smallholder on Svalbard. Martha unavailable for comment.
- Jeremy’s latest bit of blarney.
- Tasty toms.
- A bunch more rice genomes. Wait, didn’t we Brainfood this? Of course we did, ages ago.
- Avocado tattoos?
- 3D seeds. So beautiful, so useless.
- Trees as technology.
- Like galip nut, for instance.
- My indigenous knowledge is your climate change adaptation.
- Maharashtra: Malnutrition down, high blood pressure up.
- Could probably still do with some biofortification.
- The botany of chia.
- ISBER Best Practices for biological repositories: The Webinar.
- Meet ODAP.
Nibbles: African pollinators, Wild wheat, Brazilian meet, Bamboo meet, Old seeds, Rice diversity, 5282, Frozen grapes
- Call for proposals on African pollinator informatics.
- The Linnean Society puts “Wheat Taxonomy: the legacy of John Percival” online. Heroes all.
- The Brazilian genetic resources congress gets a Facebook page.
- There’s also a bamboo and rattan congress coming up.
- A time capsule is dug up in Canada, and it’s got seeds!
- Seeking rice SNPs? Use snp-seek.
- What links the Dutch Easy India Company with a measles outbreak in the US? The answer will probably not surprise you.
- We really need some new wine grape cultivars. I mean REALLY new.
Brainfood: Biodiversity trends, Banana viruses, Forest fragmentation, Apple cryo, NPGS, Brazilian goats, Turkish AnGR, Using agrobiodiversity, Genetic variation, Leaf rust loci, Leaf Doctor, Colombian cassava
- Is local biodiversity declining or not? A summary of the debate over analysis of species richness time trends. Better data needed.
- How endogenous plant pararetroviruses shed light on Musa evolution. Some banana plants have B genomes which are non-infective for potentially nasty viral integrants, making them good parents in breeding programmes.
- Late Holocene forest contraction and fragmentation in central Africa. From one horse’s mouth: “…this fragmentation 2500 years ago allowed the migration of the Bantu through the forests, who were able to exploit pioneering trees, such as energy rich oil palms which had colonized the gaps created, as well as being able to cultivate for the first times cereals in this newly created agricultural zone, notably pearl millet.”
- Cryobiotechnology of apple (Malus spp.): development, progress and future prospects. “…one of the most extensively studied plant genera with respect to cryopreservation.”
- Sustaining the Future of Plant Breeding: The Critical Role of the USDA-ARS National Plant Germplasm System. The next level: gap filling, more phenotyping and genotyping, better info systems, more pre-breeding, improved training for using PGR in breeding programs, expanded outreach. Could say the same about the rest of the world too.
- Role of Viral Diagnostics in Quarantine for Plant Genetic Resources and Preparedness. Calls for India to put in place a “National Plant Pests Diagnostic and Certification Network.” Maybe should be added to above.
- Threatened Goat Breeds from the Tropics: The Impact of Crossbreeding with Foreign Goats. You need to be careful with it, Brazilians say.
- Importance of native animal genetic resources. Turks too.
- Editorial: Harvesting plant and microbial biodiversity for sustainably enhanced food security. A whole Research Topic, no less. No animals though…
- Genotypic variability enhances the reproducibility of an ecological study. Because it buffers the effects of “environmental” differences in laboratory studies.
- Unlocking new alleles for leaf rust resistance in the Vavilov wheat collection. 13 new loci, maybe.
- Leaf Doctor: A New Portable Application for Quantifying Plant Disease Severity. Something to test the above with.
- Household Determinants of the Adoption of Improved Cassava Varieties using DNA Fingerprinting to Identify Varieties in Farmer Fields: A Case Study in Colombia. 434 samples from 217 farmers reveals 120 varieties, 9 of which were improved; farmers overestimate their use of new varieties, but in general those with more dependents, more land, and more access to extension have more improved varieties.
Nibbles: Sustainable wheat, Bananacoin, Tuscan agrobiodiversity, Fig conservation, Foraging beer, Wizard vs Prophet, SDGs, Harlan Symposium
- General Mills goes all sustainable. But the genebanks?
- The future of bananas is banana futures. But the genebanks?
- Agrobiodiversity in Tuscany: The App. Who needs genebanks.
- “Correia, a 59-year-old third-generation Delta resident, has one of the most diverse collections of the common fig, Ficus carica, in the world.” Put that in an app.
- The two approaches to feeding 10 billion people. Only two?
- “Eradicating hunger and ensuring food security is a bottom-line requirement for achieving sustainable development and well-being.” Problem is, it’s not the top priority.
- Otherwise orphan crops wouldn’t be orphans.
- Foraged beer is a thing. A very cool thing, and you can probably use orphan crops too.
- A place to discuss all of the above? The Third Jack R. Harlan International Symposium.