It all started in a broken down and semi-abandoned research field station in Mexico in 1943.
That would be the CGIAR centres (and their genebanks, of course), the subject of a generous editorial in Nature Plants today.
Golden Genes: The Movie
The frozen, bodiless genes of millions of plants, animals and humans are stored in biobanks around the world. They rekindle dreams of old: re-creating extinct species, ending world hunger, human life without illness or disease. But biobanks do more than that. They pose a fundamental question to our contemporary beliefs: What does it mean to be part of nature in the age of the genome?
Goldene Gene Trailer from Wolfgang Konrad on Vimeo.
Nibbles: Aeroponic yams, Ancient crops, Kumara, Informal food vendors, Foxy, Salumi, Corn whiskey, Doomed cassava
- Yams up in the air, but in a good way.
- Yet another couple of things on how “ancient crops” will save us all. All crops are ancient. Well, except the kiwi.
- Lovely little film on a lovely sweet-potato-growing New Zealand couple to make up for that uncalled-for dig at the kiwi. Made my day.
- Engage with kiosk holders, don’t hassle them.
- Review of a book on the quixotic attempt to resynthesize the dog. Why bother?
- More Italian salami than you can shake a stick at.
- Might go well with some artisanal Mexican corn whiskey.
- Cassava is “pointed in the direction of extinction.” Thank goodness for genebanks, eh?
More Mexican maize mayhem
It didn’t take long for my prediction to come true that the Mexican maize dataset I blogged about a couple of weeks back would get some more attention. The lead author of that previous paper, Hugo Perales, has teamed up with Quetzalcóatl Orozco-Ramírez and our old friend Robert Hijmans to do a deep dive into the database of 18,176 georeferenced observations of about 60 maize races. Some key findings:
- Both at national and state level, there are a few very common races, and many races with very few observations.
- 10% of the races account for 54% of the records.
- Over half of the races account for 10% of the records.
- The maximum distance between two records of the same race was just over 1000 km on average, the maximum about 2600 km, and lower than 200 km for 7 races.
- There was a positive association between the number of observations and the number of races in both 50 km and 100 km square cell.
I particularly liked the new map of “maize communities,” that is, regions where more or less similar assemblages of races are found.
Although the previous paper had a similar map of “biogeographic regions,” this is more detailed and robust. Intriguingly, the hotspots of highest diversity tend to occur where distinct maize communities meet.
I’ll see if I can get Robert so say a few words about this work here.
Brainfood: Dope diversity, Potato chips, Conservation costing, Island breeding systems, Indus civilization cereals, Drone phenotyping, Wild rice in Asia, Wild rice & Native Americans, Pearl millet temperature, Climate change & fruit/veg
- Cannabis Domestication, Breeding History, Present-day Genetic Diversity, and Future Prospects. The traditional landraces are being contaminated and need urgent collection and evaluation by dedicated professionals.
- Cold sweetening diversity in Andean potato germplasm from Argentina. 5 out of 48 Andigena landraces make good chips.
- Considering cost alongside the effectiveness of management in evidence-based conservation: A systematic reporting protocol. Here comes the metadata. No excuse now.
- Self-compatibility is over-represented on islands. 66% vs 41% in Asteraceae, Brassicaceae and Solanaceae. Any crop wild relatives in the list?
- Cereals, calories and change: exploring approaches to quantification in Indus archaeobotany. Millet may not have been as important as is generally thought.
- High-Throughput Phenotyping of Sorghum Plant Height Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Its Application to Genomic Prediction Modeling. A near-infrared, green and blue (NIR-GB) camera on a drone gives pretty good results compared to a person with a tape measure, and is much more fun.
- Asian wild rice is a hybrid swarm with extensive gene flow and feralization from domesticated rice. No such thing as completely wild Asian rice.
- The dispute over wild rice: an investigation of treaty agreements and Ojibwe food sovereignty. Not wild rice at all, but what’s been happening to it might be a violation of the White Pine Treaty with the Ojibwe.
- Quantifying pearl millet response to high temperature stress: thresholds, sensitive stages, genetic variability and relative sensitivity of pollen and pistil. The problem is the pistils.
- Effect of environmental change on yield and quality of fruits and vegetables: two systematic reviews and projections of possible health effects. Bad for yield, good for nutritional quality.