- Today’s genomic breakthrough involves kernel number in maize.
- Neolithic people overhunted, then thought better of it.
- Was guinea fowl ever domesticated, I wonder?
- How to figure out if you’ve looked hard enough. For plants, that is. And some discussion.
- Gin is in trouble. But help is at hand.
- A workshop on chocolate and vanilla. My kinda event. And chocolate does need help. Gin, chocolate. Pretty soon life wont be worth living.
- Simran Sethi’s Twitter chat after TEDxManhattan was storified, but it’s gone now of course. Try this instead.
- Final say on that IPBES-1 gabfest.
- And the first say on that “Global Consultation on agricultural biodiversity for sustainable food security” thing.
Nibbles: Fisheries, Aquaculture, Oman GR centre, Neighbourhood farm, Striga control, Quinoa blog
- Indonesians integrate biodiversity with development.
- Aquaculturists integrate catfish and tilapia with carp.
- Omanis want to integrate genetic resources conservation regionally.
- A community integrates around a neighbourhood farm.
- Integrated solutions needed for Striga? Push-pull, anyone?
- New blog aims to integrate quinoa into Chilean diets.
Guarino talks!
News from the John Innes Centre in England
I confess, we had a bit of fun at the expense of the John Innes Centre yesterday. They tweeted:
Crossing wheat and peas – “how to” guides youtube.com/user/jicgermpl… Also new pea variety traced to Rohde,famous gardener us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=43f5e67f7ce…
— John Innes Centre (@JohnInnesCentre) February 4, 2013
Oh, how we laughed. And replied:
MT @johninnescentre: Crossing wheat and peasyoutube.com/user/jicgermpl… < Nice trick if you can pull it off without #GM
— Nikolay Vavilov (@NIVavilov) February 4, 2013
All immensely amusing, but that shouldn’t detract either from the JIC Germplasm YouTube channel — with it’s handy dandy videos explaining how to cross wheats and how to cross peas — or Seed Bank News, to which you can subscribe.
This paragraph caught my eye
One heritage variety of maple or carlin pea has been passed to the collection (JI 3590) that can be traced back to the famous garden historian and horticultural writer Eleanour Sinclair Ronde [sic] in the late 1930’s. This is a culinary long vined type that has been maintained by a family in Shropshire where it has been regularly grown at 1200ft and noted as having a good degree of frost tolerance compared to other common varieties.
As a long-time fan of carlin peas, and all the great stories associated with them, I’d love to know exactly how they traced JI 3590 to Eleanour Sinclair Rohde. But that’s just me.
Nibbles: Yarsagumba, Chocolate meet & dig, Beer dig, Mapping disease, Mapping language, Going digital, Urban ag meet, Weird citrus, CGIAR genebanks and more, Microbiome
- Off-colour jokes pumped out with abandon as Viagra fungus splashed all over headlines.
- Two of my favourite words in one conference: sustainable and chocolate. Can I get some archaeology with that? Yes, you can. Trifecta!
- Prefer beer to chocolate? We’ve got you covered.
- Sudden oak death mapping gets all interactive. Will nobody do something similar for agrobiodiversity?
- The geography of the onion. No, not The Onion. And not interactive.
- Go online, young scientist! Even if it involves giving banana research priority setting a Facebook page? Well, why not.
- Whoa, there’s an Urban Agriculture Summit?
- Citrus australasica? Seriously?
- CGIAR crown jewels safe at last. No off-colour headlines, please.
- Some genebanks doing ok, others not so much.
- Gut microbiome kinda sorta implicated in kwashiorkor. And more from NYT.