- 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.
Brainfood: Coffee apocalypse, Barley journey, Haplotype cores, Pollinator conservation, Rooting for tubers, Aussie CWR, European veggies, Capsicum evolution, Wheat genome
- Climate change adaptation of coffee production in space and time. There’s a plan, at least for Nicaragua.
- Journey to the east: Diverse routes and variable flowering times for wheat and barley en route to prehistoric China. Growing in diverse environments pre-adapted barley for its shift to spring sowing and move eastwards to China.
- Capturing haplotypes in germplasm core collections using bioinformatics. Fortunately, “the number of accessions necessary to capture a given percentage of the haplotypic diversity present in the entire collection can be estimated.”
- Pollinator Diversity: Distribution, Ecological Function, and Conservation. 350,000 species!
- Roots, Tubers and Bananas: Planning and research for climate resilience. Much the same, but faster.
- Priorities for enhancing the ex situ conservation and use of Australian crop wild relatives. Go north, young woman.
- Consequences of climate change for conserving leafy vegetable CWR in Europe. Go, err, northwest.
- Phylogenetic relationships, diversification and expansion of chili peppers (Capsicum, Solanaceae). Monophyletic clade which originated along the Andes of W to NW South America and spread clockwise around the Amazon.
- The Aegilops tauschii genome reveals multiple impacts of transposons. The D genome bites the dust.
Nibbles: Joanne Labate, Gebisa Ejeta, David Spooner, Strawberry 101, Mad honey, First figs, Agrobiodiversity maps, School project, Takesgiving, Private investment
- USDA vegetable crop curator tells it like it is.
- $5 million to find more Striga resistance genes in sorghum.
- Wild potato herbarium specimens find good home.
- How two New World strawberries got together in the Old World and then spread all over the world.
- Hallucinogenic honey: what could possibly go wrong?
- First farmers gave a fig.
- The other of all agrobiodiversity map mashups.
- Cool school project on crop diversity in Europe.
- In other news, “Columbusing” is a thing.
- Private sector investment in conservation: Turning “small and new” into “big and familiar.”