- A direct comparison of remote sensing approaches for high-throughput phenotyping in plant breeding. Drones are best.
- Intraspecific taxonomy of plant genetic resources — Important for differentiation of medicinal and aromatic plants? It depends.
- Effects of development on indigenous dietary pattern: A Nigerian case study. Teenagers are rebellious.
- Nutritional composition and antioxidant activity of twenty mung bean cultivars in China. Good news for hipsters everywhere.
- Production and genetic improvement of minor cereals in China. And they’re good for you too. But will the rest of the world benefit from them?
- Characterization of chickpea germplasm conserved in the Indian National Genebank and development of a core set using qualitative and quantitative trait data. 1,103 are representative of 14,651, if you pick them right.
- Whole-genome duplication as a key factor in crop domestication. Comparing within genera, 54% of crops are polyploids on average, versus 40% of the wild species.
- Effect of the management of seed flows and mode of propagation on the genetic diversity in an Andean farming system: the case of oca (Oxalis tuberosa Mol.). Richer farmers conserve and exchange more.
- Global Tree Cover and Biomass Carbon on Agricultural Land: The contribution of agroforestry to global and national carbon budgets. Almost half of agricultural land has a significant number of trees on it, which sequester a lot of C.
Brainfood: Myrciaria value chains, Finger millet WTP, Italian olive choice, Resilience, Rural livelihoods, Ganja conservation strategy, Sorghum erosion
- Building value chains for indigenous fruits: lessons from camu-camu in Peru. It’s the local markets, stupid.
- Assessing the potential for niche market development to contribute to farmers’ livelihoods and agrobiodiversity conservation: Insights from the finger millet case study in Nepal. What they said.
- Agro-biodiversity of Mediterranean crops: farmers’ preferences in support of a conservation programme for olive landraces. See above.
- Is resilience a useful concept in the context of food security and nutrition programmes? Some conceptual and practical considerations. Yes, because it integrates a lot of stuff. But it’s difficult to measure.
- The Changing Nature of Agricultural Livelihoods along a Peri-urban to Rural Gradient in Eastern Madagascar. Rural people farm less if they can. Wonder what that means for crop diversity.
- A Belated Green Revolution for Cannabis: Virtual Genetic Resources to Fast-track Cultivar Development. Oh my.
- On-farm diversity of sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] and risks of varietal erosion in four regions of Burkina Faso. 73% of lost varieties were found.
Brainfood: China cereal yield, US soybean breeding, Breadfruit genomics, Field app, Urban ag, Rose breeding, Strawberry cryo, Global biodiversity loss, Oceania bananas, Vegetable breeding, Badass Chinese sheep
- Patterns of Cereal Yield Growth across China from 1980 to 2010 and Their Implications for Food Production and Food Security. There has been yield stagnation over about 50% of total area of rice and maize, 15% of wheat.
- Genomic signatures of North American soybean improvement inform diversity enrichment strategies and clarify the impact of hybridization. 579 soybean varieties released 1940-2009 fall into 3 maturity groups, the overall diversity of which is not too different from the diversity of the ancestor landraces.
- Low-Coverage, Whole-Genome Sequencing of Artocarpus camansi (Moraceae) for Phylogenetic Marker Development and Gene Discovery. There’s been a whole genome duplication in Artocarpus.
- ColectoR, a Digital Field Notebook for Voucher Specimen Collection for Smartphones. So many of these things around.
- Potential ecosystem services of urban agriculture: a review. Important at local scale, not so much at global scale.
- Nineteenth century French rose (Rosa sp.) germplasm shows a shift over time from a European to an Asian genetic background. Ah, the lure of the exotic; 19 genetic groups, not corresponding to horticultural groups.
- Cryopreservation of in vitro shoot tips of strawberry by the vitrification method — establishment of a duplicate collection of Fragaria germplasm. The German national collection, including wild relatives, is a bit safer.
- Has land use pushed terrestrial biodiversity beyond the planetary boundary? A global assessment. Looks like it. Cross-reference with crop wild relatives?
- Traditional Banana Diversity in Oceania: An Endangered Heritage. Out of New Guinea…
- The contribution of international vegetable breeding to private seed companies in India. Vegetable breeding by AVRDC still has a role as R&D shifts to the private sector, but it’s different to what it was.
- Whole-genome sequencing of native sheep provides insights into rapid adaptations to extreme environments. Genomes of 77 Chinese breeds from extreme environments reveal genes likely to be useful in extreme environments.
Nibbles: Fundament edition
- Badass sheep genomes sequenced.
- FAO assesses drylands.
- Sun shines on enkir again.
- Beans good for anemia. Keep you regular too.
- Jacksy‘s the next breadfruit.
- De-extinction is no back door to conservation.
Ancient agricultural DNA everywhere
Heady days for ancient DNA researchers. There have been two major papers in the past month looking at the DNA of Neolithic farmers. Back in June, a huge research consortium published “The genetic structure of the world’s first farmers” as a preprint in bioRxiv, with subsequent write-up in Nature. And now a different huge consortium comes out with “Early Neolithic genomes from the eastern Fertile Crescent,” in Science. That also got widely picked up.
Don’t ask me why two separate research groups need to be working on basically the same problem, in basically the same way. I suppose they’re using somewhat different methods on different material. I really couldn’t tell you whether it would have been better to pool the material, or standardize the methods, or indeed both. Maybe someone out there will tell us. In any case, it’s reassuring, I suppose, that the two studies came to broadly similar conclusions, namely that there were genetic differences among early farmers, and that genetically distinct people from different parts of the Fertile Crescent migrated north into Europe and eastwards further into Asia. Which in turn suggests to some that the origins of agriculture may be described as “federal”:
Different and genetically distinct populations were all engaged in this same general project, albeit exchanging ideas with each or other or sometimes coming up with the same idea independently.
Meanwhile, sequencing of DNA from a 6000-year-old barley from the Dead Sea shows close similarity with varieties still grown in the southern Levant and Egypt. Intriguing to speculate whether a similar study of material from the Zagros Mountains would show a parallel pattern to the human DNA. But will it need a different group of researchers to do it.