Category: Genebanks

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Nibbles: Forests and agriculture, Seed collecting, Banana book, Fermentation, Cucumber history, Myrrh, Farm systems, Dog genetics, Chocolate wars

  • Seven forest myths exposed. And more on the work debunking one of them. Yeah I know we already Nibbled it, get over it.
  • And you know what, here’s another one we already Nibbled, on collecting seeds in Central Asia. But I just read it again in the hardcopy version and it’s really cool and I like seeing people I know in funny shorts. Incidentally, the dead tree version has a link to Vaviblog that is unaccountably missing online.
  • Will no one buy me this fabulous banana book? (Not if you keep being rude to your reader. Ed.)
  • Second installment of that we-farm-because-we-like-beer thing. I’m not sure about the theory, but I like the way this guy writes. Yes, it’s a little look at me, look at me. But sometimes you need that.
  • Tales of the cucumber. Does anyone remember if we blogged about this paper?
  • More to myrrh than meets the eye. And more than most folk need to know.
  • Oxford boffins say a pox on both your houses: “environmentally friendly” farms better than conventional and organic.
  • National Geographic tackles the dog. Amazingly, all the photos are of, ahem, dogs.
  • What’s with all this stuff about cacao lately? Has someone sequenced another variety or something?
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Looking for a (double) grain in a seedbank

Thanks to Mike Jackson for taking up the challenge of finding more examples of double-grained rice. He got in touch with friends at his old stomping grounds in the IRRI genebank, and the indispensable Ms Flora de Guzman there, who heads of that genebank past and present will I’m sure forgive me for saying actually runs the place, 1 came up with a variety from Nepal called Laila Majnu. This was sent to IRRI in 1981, and is conserved in the genebank as accession IRGC 59101 (and incidentally safety duplicated at Svalbard). The fact that IRGC 59101 (which is pictured below, thanks to Ms de Guzman again) is a bit of a strange morphological variant isn’t mentioned in the genebank database, however. Not the electronic version, anyway. Ms de Guzman simply remembered the variety and dove back into her notebooks to find it. Next time I think about venturing into Genebank Database Hell, I want her as my guide…

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Collecting Missions Repository gets an upgrade

I don’t want to get a reputation as a curmudgeonly old coot 2, so let me grasp an opportunity that has fallen into my lap to trumpet a small but significant improvement in conditions down in Genebank Database Hell.

I have on occasion noted that if you wanted to share a link to one of the historical collecting mission reports catalogued in the Collecting Missions Repository, you wouldn’t be able to. No permalink, see? You had to provide the code number of the collecting mission and leave your interlocutor to do the rest, as we did in a recent post on wild Brassica, for example.

No longer. I have been informed, and have verified the fact, that each report now has a handy permalink, reachable from the metadata page.

Let me be the first to congratulate the developers. Would that the folks at Climate Analogues were so obliging…

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Nibbles: ICT, New institute, Brit apples, Coconut embryos, Farm cinema, Seeds, Southern obesity, Biofortification, Prize, Kew