Genebanks

April 9, 2018April 9, 2018

Where to find stressed rice in Nigeria

So last week’s Brainfood led with a paper mapping various abiotic stresses affecting rice in Africa, noting that the next step would be to mash up the results with germplasm provenances.

Well, I decided to do it myself. Here’s the distribution of “iron-rich soils” in Nigeria and potentially affected rice area (the paper’s Fig. 8b), the latter coming from the SPAM project we have alluded to before as a source of data on crop cultivation.

The yellow rings are African rice landraces, the red dots all rice landraces, both from Genesys. If you click on the map, you’ll see it much better, and notice that there’s not much rice germplasm from the more brownish areas, denoting rice cultivation areas with Fe-richer soils. Should these be targets for collecting? Kind of depends if landraces are still grown in those places, but it’s a start.

April 3, 2018April 30, 2018

Brainfood: Rice stress maps, Saline rice, Forage millet, Diversification, Deforestation & diets, CC impacts, Elite cassava, Indian quarantine, Chinese urban ag, Squash diversity, Tomato minerals, Hidden hunger

Mapping abiotic stresses for rice in Africa: Drought, cold, iron toxicity, salinity and sodicity. Now to mash this up with germplasm provenance information…
Screening of rice landraces (Oryza sativa L.) for seedling stage salinity tolerance using morpho-physiological and molecular markers. …you know, so that this sort of thing could be predicted, perhaps.
Identification of promising sources for fodder traits in the world collection of pearl millet at the ICRISAT genebank. 14 out of 326. Difficult to predict from environmental data, though, I suspect.
Agricultural diversification as an important strategy for achieving food security in Africa. More diverse households and farming systems are more food secure, but only up to a point, and it depends on various factors. 43% of African cropland will be difficult to diversify.
Deforestation and child diet diversity: A geospatial analysis of 15 Sub-Saharan African countries. Deforestation is bad for diet diversity. No word on overlap with the above mentioned 43%.
Two-thirds of global cropland area impacted by climate oscillations. I bet you that includes most of the above-mentioned 43%.
Exchanging and managing in-vitro elite germplasm to combat Cassava Brown Streak Disease (CBSD) and Cassava Mosaic Disease (CMD) in Eastern and Southern Africa. The devil is in the logistics.
Risk of pathogens associated with plant germplasm imported into India from various countries. See what I mean?
An exploration of the implication and feasibility of UAH (Urban Agricultural Heritages) in China. I for one really want to see the Xuanhua traditional vineyard system.
Genetic Resources in the “Calabaza Pipiana” Squash (Cucurbita argyrosperma) in Mexico: Genetic Diversity, Genetic Differentiation and Distribution Models. Balsas-Jalisco is a potential center of domestication. Isn’t it the same for maize?
Genetic differences in macro-element mineral concentrations among 52 historically important tomato varieties. Fairly strong and mostly independent, except for K and Mg.
The global burden of chronic and hidden hunger: Trends and determinants. Growth not as good on hidden hunger as on chronic. Let them eat tomatoes.

March 26, 2018March 26, 2018

Brainfood: Mesoamerican fruits, PES, Chinese vegetables, Controlled pollination, Pastoralist fodder, Taxonomy, African nightshades, Ag origins, Divortification

Human diets drive range expansion of megafauna-dispersed fruit species. Megafauna dropped the ball (or the fruit), humans picked it up and ran with it.
Experimental evidence on payments for forest commons conservation. Maybe we should have paid the megafauna.
Vegetable genetic resources in China. 3 genebanks, 36,000 accessions, 120 species, about 1000 distributions per year (to research units).
A cost-effective ground pollination system for hybridization in tall coconut palms. I have seen the future of coconut pollination.
Determinants of pastoral and agro-pastoral households’ participation in fodder production in Makueni and Kajiado Counties, Kenya. Household heads who are female, have access to extension services, or are members of social groups are more likely to go in for fodder production.
Taxonomy based on science is necessary for global conservation. Incredible to me that needs to be said.
Development of next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based SSRs in African nightshades: Tools for analyzing genetic diversity for conservation and breeding. Solanum scabrum and S. villosum separate nicely, and show much diversity.
A natural adaptive syndrome as a model for the origins of cereal agriculture. Large seed, awns and monodominance.
Development and Examination of Sweet Potato Flour Fortified with Indigenous Underutilized Seasonal Vegetables. Ticks all the boxes, lets call it divortification.

March 14, 2018March 14, 2018

Lost rice found, again

First there was Carolina Gold. Now there is “upland red bearded” or “Moruga Hill” rice.

Mr. Dennis had heard about hill rice…through the culinary organization Slow Food USA and the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, the group that brought back Carolina Gold in the early 2000s. He’d also heard stories about it from elderly cooks in his community. Like everyone else, he thought the hill rice of the African diaspora was lost forever.

But then, on a rainy morning in the Trinidad hills in December 2016, he walked past coconut trees and towering okra plants to the edge of a field with ripe stalks of rice, each grain covered in a reddish husk and sprouting spiky tufts.

“Here I am looking at this rice and I said: ‘Wow. Wait a minute. This is that rice that’s missing,’” he said.

It is hard to overstate how shocked the people who study rice were to learn that the long-lost American hill rice was alive and growing in the Caribbean. Horticulturists at the Smithsonian Institution want to grow it, rice geneticists at New York University are testing it and the United States Department of Agriculture is reviewing it. If all goes well, it may become a commercial crop in America, and a menu staple as diners develop a deeper appreciation for African-American food.

And no, they couldn’t have found it in genebanks. ¹ This is what Genesys knows from the region. Trinidad is shown by the yellow marker, rice accessions in red. No rice accessions in Genesys from anywhere near Trinidad, alas.

Someone should really have a systematic look at all those red dots, though.

March 14, 2018March 14, 2018

That Pawnee corn thread

As one of those who prefers not to visit some social sites unless I need to, let’s see whether this works.

Unrolled thread from @AgBioWorld