- Climate-resilient crops: Lessons from xerophytes. Breeding for Na+ exclusion to improve salinity tolerance in crops has compromised their drought tolerance, but both tolerances are down to more gene copies in key families when comparing species.
- Innovation and Technological Mismatch: Experimental Evidence from Improved Crop Seeds. Breeders should strive to give farmers what they want, even if it means releasing multiple locally adapted varieties rather than a single blockbuster.
- Stressors and Resilience within the Cassava Value Chain in Nigeria: Preferred Cassava Variety Traits and Response Strategies of Men and Women to Inform Breeding. Man and women want different things from cassava breeders.
- Intra-household discrete choice experiment for trait preferences: a new method. If only there was a new way to measure that…
- Genome editing to re-domesticate and accelerate use of barley crop wild relatives. No word on whether men and women would edit different genes.
- Understanding Genome Structure Facilitates the Use of Wild Lentil Germplasm for Breeding: A Case Study with Shattering Loci. I suspect neither men nor women would tolerate shattering lentils.
- Repeat turnover meets stable chromosomes: repetitive DNA sequences mark speciation and gene pool boundaries in sugar beet and wild beets. But you can’t use wild species in breeding if you can’t cross them with the crop, and in beet that’s down to the repeatome. So maybe this would make a better case for domestication through gene editing than barley or lentils?
- Development of trait-specific genetic stocks derived from wild Cicer species as novel sources of resistance to important diseases for chickpea improvement. Would be really cool to domesticate one of the really resistant tertiary genepool species.
- Developing Genetic Resources Within the Chenopodium Genus to Advance Quinoa Breeding and the de novo Domestication of C. berlandieri. Not that you need gene editing for domesticating crop wild relatives.
- Genomic traces of Japanese malting barley breeding in two modern high-quality cultivars, ‘Sukai Golden’ and ‘Sachiho Golden’. Old-fashioned breeding has been pretty successful, so who needs CWR, gene editing and discrete choice experiments? ((Last bit added purely for clicks, I’m desperate.))
- Consistent effects of independent domestication events on the plant microbiota. I hope all those gene-editing de novo domesticators are considering the novo microbiomes.
Brainfood: Nutrition edition
- Which crop biodiversity is used by the food industry throughout the world? A first evidence for legume species. Mainly soy, alas. Which is bad because…
- Diversified agriculture leads to diversified diets: panel data evidence from Bangladesh. …promoting diversified farming systems and market participation is good for women’s empowerment and better diets. Which is just as well because…
- Historical shifting in grain mineral density of landmark rice and wheat cultivars released over the past 50 years in India. …breeding hasn’t been good for nutritional content in staples.
- Surviving mutations: how an Indonesian Capsicum frutescens L. cultivar maintains capsaicin biosynthesis despite disruptive mutations. But if you can breed for extreme pungency, you can surely breed for better nutrient content.
- Exploiting Indian landraces to develop biofortified grain sorghum with high protein and minerals. Yep, simple selection can make a sorghum landrace more nutritious.
- Genome-edited foods. Or you could resort to gene editing.
- Adoption and impact of improved amaranth cultivars in Tanzania using DNA fingerprinting. Although maybe it might be easier to just eat more amaranth.
- Stakeholders’ perceptions of and preferences for utilizing fonio (Digitaria exilis) to enrich local diets for food and nutritional security in Nigeria. But documenting knowledge will be key in either case.
- Domestication through clandestine cultivation constrained genetic diversity in magic mushrooms relative to naturalized populations. And watch what you’re doing to diversity.
Nibbles: CAAS genebank, VACS, Opportunity crops, Ross-Ibarra, Canary sweetpotatoes, Land Institute crowdsourcing, BBC seed podcast
- The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences genebank fills some gaps.
- I wonder if any of those new accessions are “opportunity crops.”
- Because they are sorely needed, for example in Africa.
- Which is not to say working on staples like maize isn’t cool. Just ask Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra.
- Working on sweet potato can also be, well, sweet. Case in point: gorgeous book on the varieties of the Canaries.
- There’s an opportunity to help the Land Institute with its research on perennial crops.
- And yes, seeds are indeed alive. Just ask CAAS.
Nibbles: Public breeding, Millet Man, Strampelli museum, Ghana community seedbanks, genebank trifecta, CWR, Illegal Canadian potatoes, Açaí GI, Mayocoba bean, Spartan Actinidia, Bitters
- Public sector plant breeders are disappearing.
- The Millet Man of India is still there though. And why he’s important.
- A museum to public sector breeder Nazareno Strampelli appears in Italy.
- Another couple of community genebanks appear in Ghana.
- We can never have too many discussions on the importance of genebanks, so here’s another one. Not much on the community sort, though. Here’s another example: Ireland. Even the Arab States of Asia want one!
- And a deep dive on crop wild relatives in genebanks to round things off.
- A community saves illegal potatoes in Canada. Yeah, I know, there’s a lot to unpack there.
- Maybe that humble illegal potato needs a geographic indication, like that superfood, açaí.
- The Mayocoba bean as a superfood is a bit of a stretch, but there’s plenty of other pulses out there making waves.
- The Michigan State kiwi could probably do with a geographic indication too, come to think of it. Cold-hardy and smooth-skinned? Super!
- Ok, this is probably the last Nibbles before Christmas, so let’s celebrate with a drink: with bitters of course.
Brainfood: MLS, PPP, GMOs, SINAREFI, FGD, InDel
- What Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture Are Available under the Plant Treaty and Where Is This Information? It’s really difficult to know, and it shouldn’t be.
- Bridging the gap? Public–private partnerships and genetically modified crop development for smallholder farmers in Africa. They really haven’t worked. But should they have?
- Recalcitrant maize: Conserving agrobiodiversity in the era of genetically modified organisms. Trying to keep landraces and GMOs both physically and conceptually apart won’t work, and doesn’t need to.
- Flavour, culture and food security: The spicy entanglements of chile pepper conservation in 21st century Mexico. Efforts to ensure food security needs to take flavour into account if they are to work.
- Gender differential in choices of crop variety traits and climate-smart cropping systems: Insights from sorghum and millet farmers in drought-prone areas of Malawi. Efforts to improve crop adaptation and resilience to climate change need to take gender into account if they are to work.
- A target cultivar-specific identification system based on the chromatographic printed array strip method for eight prominent Japanese citrus cultivars. Specific DNA markers can be used to enforce plant breeders’ rights.