- The latest on the Pristine Myth of the Amazon. And how to protect it.
- Rice going nuclear in Bangladesh.
- NYC gets a chocolate museum.
- What is biodiversity? Answers on a postcard, please…
- Maybe robots can help with that.
- Crops for the Future gets the Virginia Gewin treatment.
- Sheep domestication in half a page.
Brainfood: ABS data, Spanish chestnuts, Norwegian CWR, Bambara genome, AnGR, Jakar sheep decline, Ashanti pig, Bactris biopiracy, Avocado core, Brassicacea phylogeny
- Access and Benefit Sharing under the Convention on Biological Diversity and Its Protocol: What Can Some Numbers Tell Us about the Effectiveness of the Regulatory Regime? That not much has happened. Between 1996 and 2015, out of the 14 countries with ABS legislation in force, 2 agreements for commercial researches per year.
- Genetic monitoring of traditional chestnut orchards reveals a complex genetic structure. The diversity in Spain is in the rootstocks.
- Climate change and national crop wild relative conservation planning. Well, for Norway anyway.
- Integrating genetic maps in bambara groundnut [Vigna subterranea (L) Verdc.] and their syntenic relationships among closely related legumes. Synteny to the rescue.
- Stakeholder involvement and the management of animal genetic resources across the world. Breeders’ associations and cooperatives are the key.
- Decline of Jakar sheep population in pastoral communities of Bhutan: A consequence of diminishing utility, alternate income opportunities and increasing challenges. It’s the fault of the caterpillar fungus.
- Origin and phylogenetic status of the local Ashanti Dwarf pig (ADP) of Ghana based on genetic analysis. It’s a bit of a mongrel.
- Genetic analysis identifies the region of origin of smuggled peach palm seeds. Genebank confirms biopiracy.
- Genetic Structure and Selection of a Core Collection for Long Term Conservation of Avocado in Mexico. 36 of 318 accessions recover 80% of total alleles, which seems a bit low.
- Genome sequencing supports a multi-vertex model for Brassiceae species. More than just “triangle of U”.
Brainfood: Arabidopsis refugia, Potato diversity, Palm uses, Coffee phylogeny, Traditional harvesting, Buckwheat trends, Maize double haploids, African cattle, Endophenotype
- On the post-glacial spread of human commensal Arabidopsis thaliana. A bit like Neanderthals.
- Exploration of the genetic diversity of cultivated potato and its wild progenitors (Solanum sect. Petota) with insights into potato domestication and genome evolution. Elite cultivars are a pretty diverse lot.
- Fundamental species traits explain provisioning services of tropical American palms. Bigger, more widespread species are more important to local people. Which means some useful things may be being missed.
- Genotyping-by-sequencing provides the first well-resolved phylogeny for coffee (Coffea) and insights into the evolution of caffeine content in its species: GBS coffee phylogeny and the evolution of caffeine content. Origin of the genus could be Africa. Or Asia. Or the Arabian Peninsula. So that narrows it down.
- A quiet harvest: linkage between ritual, seed selection and the historical use of the finger-bladed knife as a traditional plant breeding tool in Ifugao, Philippines. People kept old harvesting technology because it helped them show due reverence to the rice plant, and select seeds.
- Old Crop, New Society: Persistence and Change of Tartary Buckwheat Farming in Yunnan, China. It’s going down, but won’t disappear. No word on what’s happening to diversity though.
- Tapping the genetic diversity of landraces in allogamous crops with doubled haploid lines: a case study from European flint maize. The things people have to do to make use of landraces.
- Conservation of indigenous cattle genetic resources in Southern Africa’s smallholder areas: turning threats into opportunities — A review. We now the breeds, but not all their characteristics, and how to get the most out of them.
- The Importance of Endophenotypes to Evaluate the Relationship between Genotype and External Phenotype. Oh for pity’s sake, something else to worry about.
A Sardinian grasspea is recognized
Congratulations to the Italian company Sa Laurera for receiving the 2016 Arca Deli Award for its Sardinian grasspea variety Inchixa.
In 2016, the SAVE Foundation announced the Arca Deli Award which is dedicated to products derived from the cultivation of local rare or endangered varieties that were recovered and maintained on a farm and are appropriately valued. We chose to compete with our Inchixa.
At the annual meeting of the foundation held in Metlika, Slovenia in September the SAVE jury met to evaluate products that had entered the competition.
A few weeks ago, we were informed that we are among the six winners! Sa Laurera is the only Italian company to have won the Arca Deli Award 2016, and our grasspea is the first Sardinian pulse to receive international recognition.
From a toxic plant, contraindicated for human consumption, to an interesting crop that deserves to be reassessed for its nutritional and nutraceutical features: It is particularly rich in protein, containing around 30g of protein per 100g of edible seeds, and seems to have positive effects for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases and osteoporosis.
The Inchixa example shows that small-scale farm work can be a starting point for the recovery and development of forgotten foods.
Preparing grasspea to eat is hard work, so “recovery and development” of this “forgotten food” must have been quite a challenge. But not an insurmountable one, apparently.
In Sardinia, new generations and urban dwellers, who are increasingly sensitive to issues related to health, food and local gastronomic traditions, not only appreciate the legume but actively seek it out.
I couldn’t find Inchixa in any of the usual databases, but “the name comes from from the Catalan word Guixa,” and there are lots of accessions of things with this name in the Spanish genebank.
Other Sardinian local names for grasspea are Denti de bècia, Piseddu, Pisu-faa, Pisu a tres atzas. Propagation material used to start the recovery of landrace derives from small-scale cultivations of our relatives, who have mostly cultivated this crop for self-consumption.
Piseddu is the only one of these which I found on Genesys, collected in Sardinia and conserved in Germany. Thank goodness for those relatives, but I hope they put all of these landraces in a genebank somewhere. Perhaps ICARDA’s? They have very little from Italy, but lots from the rest of the area of the crop (click to enlarge the map).
Nibbles: Meet a breeder, Radiation breeding, Cassava IK, Banana apocalypse, Chestnut doom & gloom, Crazy grafter, Crazy recombination, Obsidian sickle, Cat rug
- Meet a pumpkin breeder.
- Meet the history of atomic plant breeding.
- Meet a cassava anthropologist.
- Dial back the banana apocalypse stuff, banana guy says.
- On the other hand, the American chestnut apocalypse is all too real.
- A really wild pig.
- Grafting gone wild.
- Wild plants reveal a gene to speed plant breeding, someday.
- Beautiful Neolithic tools from the Sea of Galilee.
- And a beautiful, but slightly freaky, Egyptian rug. Made of cat hair.