Nibbles: Collecting, US heirlooms, Sequencing NUS, Nutrition strategies, Potatoes and climate change, Italian genetics

  • NSF re-invents the genebank wheel. No, that’s unfair, they’ve given much-needed money to evolutionary scientists to go out and collect seeds of 34 species in a really pernickety way.
  • Heirlooms being lost (maybe) and being re-found in the US. Thanks to Eve (on FB) for both.
  • A Cape tomato by any other name…
  • Gates Foundation has a new nutrition strategy. Gotta admire the chutzpah of summarizing the thing in basically half a side of A4. Compare and contrast, both as to content and presentation, with the CGIAR. Unfair again, I know, but that’s the kind of mood I’m in. Jess unavailable for comment.
  • Very complicated, very pretty maps about potatoes and climate change.
  • “I failed to notice substantial contributions to discussions or presentations from breeders or seed organizations, the end users of so much of the research discussed.” Pat Heslop Harrison calls ’em like he seems ’em.

Getting genebanks right

There are 5,000 varieties of potatoes in the gene bank in Chile. Wotske, this year, is growing 17.

Wotske is Rosemary Wotske, owner of Poplar Bluff Farm near Strathmore in Canada, and more power to her. But what about this large potato genebank in Chile? That sounds interesting.

Too interesting, it turns out. Because of course there isn’t one, as anyone who has spent even five minutes looking into potato genebanks can ascertain. Or rather, there is a potato genebank in Chile but it’s got about 700 accessions and not 5,000 — or it did the last time the data in WIEWS were updated. And there is a much larger, international genebank not too far away, at the International Potato Center (CIP), but it’s got about 4,300 potato landraces, and Peru isn’t Chile is it?

Nibbles: Nigerian farmer speaks, Kenya meeting, Ecuador, Striga-resistant sorghum, Designer veg, Cottontail, Funding conservation, African adaptation

Brainfood: Sorghum core diversity, Indian mango diversity, Montia potential, Assisted migration, Corchorus diversity, Soil DNA, Fire!, Coffee pest, Earthworms

Making life simpler for you, we have created an open Mendeley group for the papers we link to here. If you’re already using Mendeley, feel free to join the group (and use it to suggest papers we might miss). You can also discuss papers there, but frankly, we’d prefer you to do that here. Or on Facebook. Even if you don’t use Mendeley, you can subscribe to the RSS feed from the group and get stuff that way. Are we cool, or what?