- Fir trees holding their value. It must be Christmas.
- Mistletoe is good for trees. Is it still Christmas?
- An indicator framework for assessing agroecosystem resilience. Santa is being good to us this year.
- “Banana-shaped” takes on a whole new meaning.
- How to do crowdsourcing, right? Right!
- How to write good about agricultural research.
- Testing other kinds of grain and other kinds of bread.
- The East African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation comes in for some stick over draft policy on plant variety protection laws. This deserves way more than a Nibble. Perhaps some well-informed policy wonks will chime in.
- Blame 18th century Japanese rice traders for the futures markets.
- Who do I blame for Cassavabase?
Nibbles: Cheese, Gluten, Food security, Agrobiodiverse fields
- BBC makes a meal of very old cheese.
- Botanist in the kitchen dishes the whole history of gluten.
- Food boffin reflects on UK Women’s Institute test recipes for Global Food Security.
- Dewy-eyed farmer says you can’t eat agrobiodiversity, but so what.
Brainfood: Core collections, Romanian pigs, Commons, Valuation, Biofortification, Yam characterization, Pompeii diet, Rice grain genetics
- Maximizing genetic differentiation in core collections by PCA-based clustering of molecular marker data. It works. In simulations, to be fair.
- Study of rare traditional pork breeds concerning the aspect of biodiversity conservation. Mangalitsa is what you want, apparently.
- Open Variety Rights: Rethinking the Commodification of Plants. A “protected commons”? Sounds a bit like the ITPGRFA to me.
- Natural and cultural heritage in mountain landscapes: towards an integrated valuation. Yeah, but does your cultural heritage include things like agricultural biodiversity?
- Fortifying plants with the essential amino acids lysine and methionine to improve nutritional quality. Conventional breeding hasn’t worked. But has it been for want of trying? Just askin’.
- Genetic and phenotypic diversity in a germplasm working collection of cultivated tropical yams (Dioscorea spp.). Relationships among species, synonyms, duplicates, yada yada.
- Roman food refuse: urban archaeobotany in Pompeii, Regio VI, Insula 1. Romans ate a Mediterranean diet. Still no cure for cancer.
- Genetic bases of rice grain shape: so many genes, so little known. Why bother? Just askin’.
Man-tall wheats
Via CIMMYT’s Flickr page:
Bibiana Espinosa of the germplasm bank is one of two runners up this week in our photo competition for CIMMYT staff and friends, with this image showing very tall wheat being regenerated at Mexicali. Although keeping seeds at low temperatures extends their lives, the bank must sow and reharvest all of its thousands of incredibly diverse samples periodically to make sure the seeds remain viable. Says Bibiana: “It was amazing to see wheat plants taller than Tom Payne!”
Photo credit: B. Espinosa/CIMMYT.
Chicken salad
Ultimately, researchers hope to get ancient DNA from well-dated bones. But “replicable DNA has been as rare as hen’s teeth,” Zeder says, thanks to contamination issues and tropical climes that degrade DNA. One team recently claimed to have mtDNA from an ancient Polynesian chicken bone in Chile — a dramatic find that would prove Polynesians reached the Americas before Columbus — but the find has been questioned as possibly contaminated (Science, 11 June 2010, p. 1344). Techniques are improving, however…
That cliff-hanger is a quote from a rather attractive Science spread enticingly entitled “In Search of the Wild Chicken,” reproduced a few days ago in an ILRI blog post. It’s a great story, but one wonders why there was not at least a mention of the recent paper in PLOSOne “Investigating the Global Dispersal of Chickens in Prehistory Using Ancient Mitochondrial DNA Signatures.” Those authors, after all, had 92 — count them!! — archaeological chicken bones to play with, and spun a convincing tale of “multiple prehistoric dispersals from a single Asian centre” from their analysis. Is there something of a rivalry developing in the highly competitive world of chicken DNA? Probably not, and no doubt we’ll be getting lots of cease and desist notices from the denizens of said world for even suggesting such a thing.