- CGIAR Research Programme on Roots, Tuber and Bananas gets a blog to go with its Facebook page and Twitter feed.
- Coconut clones? I don’t think so.
- Rice yield gene? I don’t think so.
- NY Times hosts a debate on conservation, and genebanks get a look-in.
- Mongolia’s reindeer herders get some advice.
- “My great grandfather’s legacy is something I grew up knowing and respecting, but my parents’ conservation ethic is something that I have always lived.”
- Marine reserves can be good for fish. And abalone?
Nibbles: Wild goat, Heirlooms, Queen’s garden, Baobabs, Bison demise, Friendly yeast, Peruvian potatoes, Saline rice
- Old goat redux.
- A really nothing piece in the Washington Post about heirlooms.
- This is more like it: take home the Queen’s heirlooms. Well, almost.
- Here’s a baobab truly worthy of a factsheet.
- It was international trade that wiped out the bison.
- Fundamentals of On-Farm Plant Breeding Course: The Video.
- Another use for yeast.
- The Parque de la Papa highlighted. But doesn’t say seeds are even going to Svalbard.
- Salinity tolerance in rice: in Goa, and at IRRI.
GCP mounts a full frontal info-attack
CGIAR’s Generation Challenge Programme is mounting a reasonably effective information blitzkrieg, and chickpeas are the shock troops, with blog posts and videos their weapons of choice. A minor triumph is in the offing on the social networking front. But I have to say I think the RSS feeds are a bit of a rout. The main site has way too many. Yet the blogs over at GCP’s main online product, the otherwise quite impressive Integrated Breeding Platform, don’t have any at all, though the discussion forums (and what exactly is the difference?) do. Time to re-think the whole RSS strategy.
Brainfood: Brassica breeding, NUS breeding, Soybean domestication, Bambara groundnut, Jatropha chain, Setaria drought tolerance
- Developing genetic resources for pre-breeding in Brassica oleracea L.: an overview of the UK perspective. Genebanks will set you free.
- Competitive underutilized crops will depend on the state funding of breeding programmes: an opinion on the example of Europe. Divert some subsidies paid directly to farmers to a Europe-wide breeding programme devoted to NUS.
- Analysis of average standardized SSR allele size supports domestication of soybean along the Yellow River. The middle part, to be precise, where it loops north.
- Bambara nut: A review of utlisation, market potential and crop improvement. Need some functioning value chains, for pity’s sake. That’s why previous promotion efforts failed miserably. Not because they’re, well, not that great a crop? In fact they’re drought-tolerant, tasty, nutritious; but difficult to process, prepare. So do market research to inform breeding.
- State-of-the-art of the Jatropha curcas productive chain: From sowing to biodiesel and by-products. Value chains? You want value chains? I’ve got a state-of-the-art one right here.
- Validation of an allele-specific marker associated with dehydration stress tolerance in a core set of foxtail millet accessions. The marker explains about 27% of total variation in dehydration tolerance in a core collection, which is apparently pretty good.
Nibbles: C4 rice breeding, Tomato genes, Fruit/nut wild relatives, Peruvian cuisine
- C4 rice: it’s really very, very complicated. And Ford Denison on the reason. Kinda.
- Speaking of tradeoffs, this tomato taste vs colour story is everywhere. What is it about the (lack of) taste of tomatoes that gets people so riled up? And I wonder what the ones grown in Alaska taste like.
- I International Symposium on Wild Relatives of Subtropical and Temperate Fruit and Nut Crops: the abstracts are online. Does it include the tomato. Nope, not getting into that one.
- There are several subtropical and temperate fruit involved in Peruvian cuisine. Right? Come on, help me out with these segues.