Genebanks

Nibbles: Ug99, Heirloom & wild tomatoes, Opium, Healthy flavours, Quinoa descriptors, Wild yak community conservation, Phenotyping facility, Tree app, ABS & EU, C4, Barley in Ethiopia, Chinese coffee

Not totally wild genes protect wheat from Ug99.
Not really wild Texas Wild tomato brings Texan back to gardening. These in Peru are wild though.
Speaking of gardening, here’s Michael Pollan on his struggles with opium.
Wild, healthy fruit flavours becoming more popular on the soft drink market, but not clear to what extent they will come from actual plants, wild or otherwise. You know, plants with yield variation and other inconveniences. Plants that some people rely on for nutrition, by the way.
Descriptors for quinoa, including the wild species. And more, much more.
I wonder if there are descriptors for wild yaks.
New UK facility for phenotyping plants, including wild ones, I’m sure.
And if those wild UK plants are trees, you can use this app to identify them, before phenotyping them. Assuming you can dig them up and squeeze them into the new facility. Anyway, maybe one of them will be European Tree of the Year.
Of course, if you wanted access to the genetic resources of such trees, you’d have to deal with the Nagoya Protocol, which the EU is getting to grips with, don’t worry.
Not many C4 species among UK trees, I guess.
Teff is C4, but that isn’t stopping people trying to replace it with barley in injira.
Next thing you know the Chinese will be swapping tea for coffee. No, wait.

Cornell has some really cool videos online, including on agriculture. And a nice short one from Stanford about that paper on exposure to high temperatures.
Getting an herbarium online.
Urban food plants go online.
For wine growers, conservation should include growing obscure varieties. Which you can find online.
Gujarat farmers don’t need to go online to save seeds. But they could. They really could.
POTUS comes face to face with biofortified sweet potato, likes what he sees. Same for Bill Gates and pigeonpea.
UCDavis has a course on programme management for plant breeders. No, not online. Not clear if it’s part of that African Plant Breeding Academy thing.

Palau finds salt-tolerant taros.
Elsewhere in the Pacific, researchers try to revive bele. That would be aibika. Or slippery kabis. Or Abelmoschus manihot.
Which is a polyploid, isn’t it? Not to mention perennial.
Bound to be lots of Pacific stuff at the Society for Economic Botany’s meeting, going on NOW. No, wait, it’s ending today. Bummer.
Did you know that the first formal plant disease record in the Pacific region was from wheat, grown in Sydney by the first colonists? Well, I’m not entirely sure if that’s true, but it’s a way of introducing this blog on wheat in this Pacifically-themed Nibbles.
Agrikalsa Nius is the monthly electronic newsletter of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock of the Solomon Islands.

Tea diversity 101.
Tea is medicinal, isn’t it? Certainly some other plants introduced to the West by the same person are.
I could tell you all about the gender gap in tea cultivation in Kenya.
And I bet there’s one in Japan too.
Not to mention in livestock-keeping. But I don’t suppose that will affect (ILRI’s) plans for a ~~Kenyan~~ livestock genebank.
Crowdsourcing herbarium data. Maybe there’s some specimens of wild tea species in there…
India reaches out to Africa. ICRISAT involved. Debal Deb, probably not so much. Chai, anyone?

Setting up a network of high potato diversity sites for in situ conservation. It has a Facebook page, so “Like” it.
Some of that diversity will no doubt find its way to Lima’s markets.
If not, Leaping and Learning will tell you how. And why.
There’s a lot of diversity in genebanks too, of course. And thank goodness for that!
Potatoes are important in Africa too.
And Japan. But do they go with eels?
What are potatoes like for micronutrients? Probably better than you think. But could be better?
If not, you can always pickle them. Can’t you?