- Food sovereignty — or lack of it — in the Pacific.
- That should probably start with taro.
- Could the banks help?
- Or blockchain?
- How about an international year?
- And better seed laws?
- Let’s change the subject…
- ICARDA durum breeders run towards the problem, use wild relatives, win prize.
- Wild relatives are good for chickpea improvement too.
- Don’t worry, if we lose an animal breed, we can always get it back. Kinda sorta.
- Source of information on heirloom varieties. Yes, there’s probably something similar for pigs.
Crop genomics conference in the past, but only just
Sorry, everyone, I should have given a shout-out to the Crops Genomics: Present & Future conference at ICRISAT, which started yesterday. All the usual social media channels are in play, and the tweeting has been considerable already. But what I don’t see, yet, is concrete applications to make the work of genebank managers (as opposed to breeders) easier and more effective. Or is that the future part?
Nibbles: Orphan edition
- The Economist jumps on the genomics-for-orphan-crops bandwagon.
- But is phenomics more important?
- And seed systems, don’t forget seed systems…
- Some of those orphan crops may get an International Day, if India has anything to do with it.
- Immortelle is as orphan as they come, but maybe not in Croatia any more.
- Amaranthus never really went away, not in Mexico.
- Persimmon, meanwhile, is being adopted by the snack industry in the US. But the Japanese are way ahead.
- Some think yerba mate is not orphan enough.
- Is yam an orphan. It depends on what your definition of is is.
- Avocado is the opposite of orphaned in Mexico. It is spoiled rotten.
- Many orphan crops are women’s crops. Case in point: enset.
- Orphan is a relative term, and reversible.
- Exhibit B: sweet potato.
- People often take their orphan crops with them. Even in antiquity.
- Coconut is fast becoming an orphan in Tanzania.
- With 32 cultivars available to grow in Louisiana alone, nobody can say lettuce is an orphan.
- Mexico and Brazil collaborate on crop diversity conservation. Including orphan crops?
- One thing that is probably not a huge priority for orphan crops is their wild relatives. Just saying.
- Anyway, we’re going to need all the orphan crops we can get if James Cameron’s titanic vegetarian utopia is to come true.
Brainfood: Setaria diversity, Planteome, Cowpea diversity, Fertile Crescent CWR, Beer flavour, Marula diversity, Wild dates
- Genetic Structure of Foxtail Millet Landraces. China is the centre of diversity, and diversity structured geographically there.
- The Planteome database: an integrated resource for reference ontologies, plant genomics and phenomics. A sort of ontology of ontologies.
- Genetic diversity and structure of Iberian Peninsula cowpeas compared to world-wide cowpea accessions using high density SNP markers. Iberian material all falls into 1 (S Europe-N Africa) of 4 worldwide groups.
- Setting conservation priorities for crop wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent. 220 priority species.
- Effects of Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) Variety and Growing Environment on Beer Flavor. It’s not just the hops.
- Molecular Characterization of Sclerocarya birrea ICRAF Field Genebank Collections. Even the duplicates identified could be good for something.
- The Domestication Syndrome in Phoenix dactylifera Seeds: Toward the Identification of Wild Date Palm Populations. Fancy maths shows there may be actual wild date palms in Oman.
A first for IRRI’s genebank
Seeds of an aromatic variety of rice from the International Rice Genebank Collection, accession IRGC 117265 (McNally et al., 2009), and of a commonly grown indica variety, ‘Macassane’, were planted for harvest in the 2015 dry season (DS) and 2016 wet season (WS), respectively (Fig. 1A,C). Seeds were sampled either from the International Rice Genebank (IRG) active collection (4°C) (IRGC 117265; https://doi.org/10.18730/1PG6J) or the storage facility (20°C and 30% RH) at the upland site (‘Macassane’) and held at 50°C for 5 days to break dormancy.
And so it begins. The first use (we think) of a DOI for a genebank accession in a published paper. Congratulations to Kath Whitehouse, Fiona Hay and Richard Ellis. And of course to the bridge-builder, Ruaraidh Sackville Hamilton, who had this to say:
We are now waiting to see how soon the Global Information System will “harvest” this info. In due course it should automatically discover that this publication’s DOI refers to this PGRFA’s DOI, and link the two DOIs.