- Dogs are different from wolves, different types of wolves are different from each other.
- Vavilov-Frankel Fellow on the move.
- Nacional cacao bean rediscovered in northern Peru.
- Manx Queenies deemed to be sustainable. And wipe that smile off your face.
Private cabbages go public in North Carolina
Of course the obligatory conspiracy theories have surfaced, but Monsanto’s gift of its extensive cabbage germplasm collection to North Carolina’s State University’s Plants for Human Health Institute seems genuine enough.
“Monsanto is pleased to contribute cabbage germplasm to N.C. State University’s Plants for Human Health Institute at the N.C. Research Campus,” said Consuelo Madere, Monsanto’s Global Vegetable and Asia Commercial lead. “We sell cabbage seed under our Seminis brand in several world areas,” she said, “and we are delighted that the Institute will be working at NCRC to develop cabbage varieties well suited to the local production needs in North Carolina. It’s a great example of public and private efforts coming together at the campus.”
That might suggest that Monsanto would look askance at the material getting too far beyond North Carolina, but Dr Allan Brown, the breeder with the Plants for Human Health Institute who will be managing the collection, assures me there are no strings attached with regard to availability. He has a long job ahead checking on the viability of all the accessions, and regenerating and multiplying the material as needed, but he sees no impediment to it eventually being widely available, though he cannot put a date on that.
That’s good news for cabbage breeders around the world. If I were a proper reporter I would ask Monsanto why they didn’t make the donation to the USDA’s Northeast Regional PI Station at Geneva, New York, which manages plenty of cabbages, and which would then very willingly have made the material available to NCSU, and everyone else to boot. Maybe I will anyway.
Identifying the source of Bluefields’ breadfruits
Frank Lohmann asked an intriguing question in a comment on a recent post about breadfruit:
I have several breadfruit trees, which most likely go back to the trees captain Bligh brought to Jamaica, does anyone know which variety that is?
The reason Frank gave for believing his plants to date back to Capt. Bligh is “because he brought them to Bluefields were I live and planted them here.”
I asked for some photos and showed them to Diane Ragone of the Breadfruit Institute in Hawaii. She said that it is certainly plausible that the tree is from Tahiti.
Pressed for a variety name, this is what she said:
It’s so hard to tell with the Tahitian varieties. There are so many of these Polynesian triploid types with round fruit and deeply lobed leaves. Perhaps Rare, which was one of the varieties that Bligh noted in the Bounty log, but no mention in the Providence log as to what he actually brought to the Caribbean. A paper on that is on my too-long and neglected list of papers on breadfruit!
So we’ll just have to wait for a positive ID. But Frank could well be right that his breadfruits go back to the famed captain. I for one will choose to believe they do.
Brainfood: Millet biscuits, Wheat micronutrients, Diversification and C footprint, Agroforestry, Epazote, Grape history, Belgian farmers, Millet phenology, Species migration, Barley domestication, Sheep genetics
- Quality characteristics of biscuits prepared from finger millet seed coat based composite flour. They’re nutritious. Crocodile Dundee on the tastiness of the iguana may, however, apply.
- Minerals and trace elements in a collection of wheat landraces from the Canary Islands. There are differences, but environment and agronomic practices could affect them.
- Lowering carbon footprint of durum wheat by diversifying cropping systems. Yes, by 7-34%, depending on how the diversification was done.
- Effect of shading by baobab (Adansonia digitata) and néré (Parkia biglobosa) on yields of millet (Pennisetum glaucum) and taro (Colocasia esculenta) in parkland systems in Burkina Faso, West Africa. Taro is a shade lover; grow it under néré, and vice versa.
- Ethnobotanical, morphological, phytochemical and molecular evidence for the incipient domestication of Epazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides L.: Chenopodiaceae) in a semi-arid region of Mexico. Good to know; I love epazote.
- Grape varieties (Vitis vinifera L.) from the Balearic Islands: genetic characterization and relationship with Iberian Peninsula and Mediterranean Basin. See the grand sweep of European history unfold.
- Microsatellite characterization of grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) genetic diversity in Asturias (Northern Spain). No evidence of communication with the previous group.
- Plant economy of the first farmers of central Belgium (Linearbandkeramik, 5200–5000 b.c.). They were dope fiends.
- Selection for earlier flowering crop associated with climatic variations in the Sahel. Compared to 1976 millet samples, samples collected in 2003 had shorter lifecycle (due to an early flowering allele at the PHYC locus increasing in frequency), and a reduction in plant and spike size. So you don’t need new varieties, the old ones will adapt to climate change. Oh, and BTW, there’s been no genetic erosion.
- Do species’ traits predict recent shifts at expanding range edges? No.
- The domestication syndrome genes responsible for the major changes in plant form in the Triticeae crops. Failure to disarticulate and 6-rows in barley, in detail. Part of a Special Issue on Barley.
- The genetics of colour in fat-tailed sheep: a review. I didn’t know karakul had fat tails.
Nordic chefs exploring Nordic foods with Nordic genebank
I was intrigued by a reference to a genebank in a restaurant review in the Wall Street Journal. Not just any restaurant, but the best restaurant in the world, Noma in Copenhagen, which is “is best known for its fanatical approach to foraging.” Here’s the reference:
Noma helped found a Nordic Food Lab, which has a gene bank that is collating information about the wild products in the region.
Nordic Food Lab does indeed sound interesting (especially its fermentation trials):
Nordic Food Lab is a non-profit self-governed institution established by head chef of Noma, Rene Redzepi and gastronomic entrepreneur, Claus Meyer with the purpose of scientifically exploring the New Nordic Cuisine and disseminating results from this exploration.
But they’re not really establishing a genebank, as suggested by the WSJ piece.
We are collaborating with Nordgen, the amazing bank of genetic material, to evaluate the gastronomic potential of bygone varieties of Scandinavian produce. We will publish our sensory evaluations as they are completed. This promises to be an extremely interesting project; many modern species are produced on other merits besides flavor, and we expect intriguing findings.
Much more sensible.
