- A new, better apple genome. I thought once it was done, it was done. Clearly not.
- An FBI agent on the tracks of old apples. No need for high quality genomes.
- Getting to the bottom of the Honeycrisp.
- It’s the rootstocks, stupid.
- What made Milwaukee famous is not heirloom apples, but still.
- Let’s not forget the crab apple, shall we?
Brainfood: CWR prioritization, CWR data, Yam core redux, Traditional landscape value, African rice domestication, Digital conservation, First farmers, Revived breed, Mitigation targets, Zoonoses, Population, JEB on legumes
- Broadening the Base, Narrowing the Task: Prioritizing Crop Wild Relative Taxa for Conservation Action. Use socioeconomic value of crop, and potential usefulness and threat status of relative.
- Germinate 3: Development of a Common Platform to Support the Distribution of Experimental Data on Crop Wild Relatives. Useful in determining the second of the above.
- Re-defining the yam (Dioscorea spp.) core collection using morphological traits. Cleaning up the core.
- “Things are different now”: Farmer perceptions of cultural ecosystem services of traditional rice landscapes in Vietnam and the Philippines. 73 indicators for the contribution of landscapes to culture, aesthetics, and local knowledge.
- A single-nucleotide polymorphism causes smaller grain size and loss of seed shattering during African rice domestication. You want no shattering? You also get smaller seeds. Like it or edit it.
- Digital conservation: An introduction. Brave new world… Special issue of Ambio.
- The Genomic History Of Southeastern Europe. Souther Greek Neolithic farmers not same as other European Neolithic farmers.
- Genomics of a revived breed: Case study of the Belgian campine cattle. Racial impurities are confined to a few farms.
- Reducing emissions from agriculture to meet the 2 °C target. We’re doomed.
- Conservation of biodiversity as a strategy for improving human health and well-being. By keeping animals and their nasty diseases away from people, we’re not talking communing with Nature here.
- The interaction of human population, food production, and biodiversity protection. Minimise the interaction.
- Nature’s pulse power: legumes, food security and climate change. Special issue of Journal of Experimental Botany on legumes. Eat up your beans!
Brainfood: Iron beans, Citrus evolution, Ethiopian co-ops, Farmer evaluation app, Exotic breeding, Cost of doing business, Plummy, Italian pears, Chinese cowpea, Breadfruit phylogeny, Seed collecting
- Iron beans in Rwanda: crop development and delivery experience. 800,000 households, discontinuation rate 11%. But the health outcomes? Too early, I guess.
- Phylogenetic origin of limes and lemons revealed by cytoplasmic and nuclear markers. It’s so VERY complicated.
- Seed producer cooperatives in the Ethiopian seed sector and their role in seed supply improvement: A review. Sitting between the formal and informal seed systems, they “play a key role in meeting seed demand and contribute greatly to seed supply improvement through high-volume production of seed, crop, and variety diversification, and seed delivery to farmers.”
- Gamification of farmer-participatory priority setting in plant breeding: Design and validation of “AgroDuos”. Based on pairwise ranking. I remember doing it by hand, but it’s nice to have the app. And there’s more.
- Emerging Avenues for Utilization of Exotic Germplasm. It comes down to the collections being better characterized and understood.
- Genetic resource policies in international collaborative research for food and agriculture: A study of USAID-funded innovation labs. Transaction costs are rising. Well, yeah.
- Plums: A Brief Introduction. Will keep you regular.
- Characterization and phylogenetic analysis of ancient Italian landraces of pear. Some synonyms found, some unknown things identified. All very worthy.
- Genetic diversity and a population structure analysis of accessions in the Chinese cowpea [Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp.] germplasm collection. The Chinese stuff is different to the African stuff.
- Out of Borneo: biogeography, phylogeny and divergence date estimates of Artocarpus (Moraceae). Yeah but how many can you eat?
- Effective seed harvesting strategies for the ex situ genetic diversity conservation of rare tropical tree populations. “…fewer seeds from each of a larger number of trees, … from peripheral subdivided regions of the population.”
Nibbles: Participatory research, Plant breeding 101, Seed systems webinar, Hot pepper, Heritage Breed Week, Girardinia fibre, Chocolate high, Avocado history, Pollinator heist
- Participate!
- In plant breeding, that is.
- And seed systems too, natch.
- And you too could come up with the world’s hottest pepper.
- Or help save a heritage breed.
- Or sustainably harvest Himalayan nettle.
- But careful not to get high on this chocolate hack.
- Though binging on avocado is perfectly acceptable.
- And for goodness’ sake, watch out for those Russians.
Mexican PGR from the air
The Atlantic had a feature last week on the Human Landscapes of Mexico showing Google Maps shots of different parts of the country. This kind of thing:
I mashed them up in Google Earth with the distribution of crop wild relatives, downloaded from Genesys. This is what I got for the environs of Guadalajara. The yellow dot is the site of the photo in The Atlantic‘s photo essay, the red circles collecting sites, mostly of wild beans.
Good thing those populations are in genebanks.