- Genebanks for nutrition. Indeed they are.
- Hot peppers may be good for you. Genebanks alerted.
- For Aboriginal Australians, knowledge is held by the living landscape, and humans get together to animate it. Fascinating.
- Humans getting together to rescue near-extinct plants from wounded landscapes of North America.
- There’s a database of animal feeds for sub-Saharan Africa. Could do with being mashed up with genebank databases, no?
- Agriculture under communism wasn’t all that communist. At least in E. Germany. I wonder what they were fed.
- A 4000-year-old apple core found in Vienna. Any DNA though?
When landraces are elite
Have you ever found a genebank accessions that performed better straight out of the box than a modern variety, under a particular set of conditions? If so, let me know below. I’d like to compile a list, because why not?
Some examples already up on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/rellanalvarez/status/1326197628548358144
Yes, we have lots of banana news
There’s recently been some interesting banana germplasm collecting in Papua New Guinea. 1
The results are summarized in two articles, one in Plants evaluating methods to ensure the viability of collected seeds, and the other in Crop Science summarizing the characterization of diverse phenotypes.
We’ve included both the papers in question in past Brainfoods, but this press release, from which the above quote is taken, does a really nice job of bringing them together. It might also have added an additional recent paper on the work of the International Musa Germplasm Transit Centre (ITC), but anyway.
There’s a whole bunch of summary statistics on the ITC, and lots of useful links, on the Genebank Platform webpage. And of course Genesys has a selection of accession-level data. But the place for all your banana information needs is ProMusa.
Brainfood: Diversification, Annona, Banana genebank, Sustainable livestock, One Health, Polyploidy, Breeding pipeline, Evolutionary breeding, Seed storage, European landraces, Governance, Virgin oil, Cereal nutrition, Spinach origins, Botany apps
- Agricultural diversification promotes multiple ecosystem services without compromising yield. Meta-meta-analysis shows diversification is good for biodiversity, pollination, pest control, nutrient cycling, soil fertility, and water regulation and not bad for crop yields either.
- Holocene land and sea‐trade routes explain complex patterns of pre‐Columbian crop dispersion. Cherimoya reached the Andes by boat.
- Safeguarding and using global banana diversity: a holistic approach. 1617 banana accessions from 38 countries maintained in an in vitro collection, backed-up in cryo; over 18,000 samples distributed to researchers and farmers in 113 countries in 35 years. And that’s just the basics.
- Designing sustainable pathways for the livestock sector: the example of Atsbi, Ethiopia and Bama, Burkina Faso. It’s not just a straight choice between intensive or extensive production, stop with the dichotomies.
- Moving health to the heart of agri-food policies; mitigating risk from our food systems. It’s difficult to separate food from health; and yet…
- Genes derived from ancient polyploidy have higher genetic diversity and are associated with domestication in Brassica rapa. Agriculture depends on polyploidy.
- Genetic diversity is indispensable for plant breeding to improve crops. Plant breeding from an industry perspective, using the Brassicaceae as a case study.
- Yield, yield stability and farmers’ preferences of evolutionary populations of bread wheat: A dynamic solution to climate change. A totally different perspective to the above, using a totally different crop. Compare and contrast.
- Enhancing seed conservation in rural communities of Guatemala by implementing the dry chain concept. Cool way for farmers to save their seeds so they can do the above.
- Landrace hotspots identification in Europe. Where to implement the above.
- Innovation and the commons: lessons from the governance of genetic resources in potato breeding. This is a tricky one. Near as I can figure it, the authors are trying to say that it’s difficult to govern genetic resources apart from the tools needed to develop and use them. But hey, you have a go.
- Conservation of Native Wild Ivory-White Olives from the MEDES Islands Natural Reserve to Maintain Virgin Olive Oil Diversity. I did not have an endemic insular wild albino olive on my bingo card.
- Agri-nutrition research: Revisiting the contribution of maize and wheat to human nutrition and health. Staple cereals are more nutritious than often thought.
- On the origin and dispersal of cultivated spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.). Spinach originated more eastward than often thought.
- What plant is that? Tests of automated image recognition apps for plant identification on plants from the British flora. Botanists shouldn’t give up their day jobs.
Genebanks and Food Security in a Changing Agriculture
This special issue results from a renewed call to demonstrate the value-in-use of conserving and supplying plant genetic resources conserved in genebanks to researchers, plant breeders, and farmers. We present these studies as a collective contribution to a relatively small body of literature that highlights not only the importance of crop plant diversity managed by genebanks but also the diversity of genebank functions and uses.
The special issue is of Food Security.
Here’s the running order:
- Valuing genebanks — Melinda Smale, Nelissa Jamora
- Conserving genetic resources for agriculture: economic implications of emerging science — Douglas Gollin
- The contribution of the International Rice Genebank to varietal improvement and crop productivity in Eastern India — Donald Villanueva, Melinda Smale, Nelissa Jamora, Grace Lee Capilit
- Dynamic conservation of genetic resources: Rematriation of the maize landrace Jala — Vanessa Ocampo-Giraldo, Carolina Camacho-Villa, Denise E. Costich
- Andean potato diversity conserved in the International Potato Center genebank helps develop agriculture in Uganda: the example of the variety ‘Victoria’ — Vivian Bernal-Galeano, George Norton, David Ellis, Noelle L. Anglin
- The contribution of the CIAT genebank to the development of iron-biofortified bean varieties and well-being of farm households in Rwanda — Stefania Sellitti, Kate Vaiknoras, Melinda Smale, Nelissa Jamora
- Use and benefits of tree germplasm from the World Agroforestry genebank for smallholder farmers in Kenya — Kavengi Kitonga, Nelissa Jamora, Melinda Smale, Alice Muchugi
- The tale of taro leaf blight: a global effort to safeguard the genetic diversity of taro in the Pacific — Sefra Alexandra, Nelissa Jamora, Melinda Smale, Michel E. Ghanem
- Transferring diversity of goat grass to farmers’ fields through the development of synthetic hexaploid wheat — Hafid Aberkane, Thomas Payne, Masahiro Kishi, Melinda Smale, Ahmed Amri
- ‘Warehouse’ or research centre? Analyzing public preferences for conservation, pre-breeding and characterization activities at the Czech genebank — Nicholas Tyack, Milan Ščasný
Kudos to my colleague Nelissa Jamora for making it happen.