Yes, fungi have genebanks too.
Blogging Niu Afa
Dr Roland Bourdeix is a senior researcher at CIRAD and an honorary research fellow at Bioversity International. He’s long worked on coconut genetic resources conservation and use, including at the Marc Delorme Research Station. He’s now in the South Pacific on a mission — in collaboration with my old pals at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community — to collect a famous Samoan coconut variety, and you can follow his progress on his new blog.
Nibbles: Drugs, Chains, Data, Year, Svalbard, Twitter, Laurel
- Opium gene decoded. Is that good?
- ILRI shares a bunch of presentations on value chains. Can’t be bad.
- Missouri Botanical Garden opens Center for Biodiversity Informatics. Will any good come of it?
- Agri scientists promote 2010 as biodiversity year. But that should have read Bioversity International. Bad.
- Wild edibles could hold key to protecting food supply? They mean wild relatives, of course. Very bad.
- More on our Twitter feed. You following us, right? Good!
- Beware the Ides of March! Laurel wreath bad for some.
Nibbles: Seeds, Genebanks, Backed up, Seed banks, Pollinators
- Molecular approaches to seed quality.
- CIAT answers the perennial question: how is Svalbard like a hard disk?
- Speaking of which, Svalbard is now the “world’s most diverse collection of crop diversity“. Er …?
- But … “Despite the rapid progress, Fowler said the bank still has significant holes in its collection“.
- Survival Seed Bank smackdown!
- Global pollinator declines: a review of a review.
New Agriculturalist does (agro)biodiversity
The New Agriculturalist has a focus on biodiversity this month, including the agricultural kind. There’s a piece on the crop wild relatives distribution modeling work of our friend and occasional contributor Andy Jarvis. And a couple of things from my old stomping ground in the Pacific. All well worth a read.