- The Sahara Forest Project: what could possibly go wrong?
- Maybe they should try breadfruit. Or avocados. Or ask this guy for advice.
- Not for all the sustainable tea in China!
- Or all the high-Fe pearl millet in India.
- Or all the wild chickens in South Asia.
- Cassava gets the genomic selection treatment. Maybe wheat too?
- Did someone mention beer?
Brainfood: Bumper bonanza, Old peas, Irrigated meadows, Cereal mashes, Medicinal plants, Diversity and production, Millet gaps, Seed ageing, Flax core
- First off — a pretty big deal. Taylor & Francis have made a bunch of papers related to sustainable agriculture freely available, but only until the end of December. Happy whatever holiday won’t offend you.
- Twentieth-century changes in the genetic composition of Swedish field pea metapopulations. Metapopulations have become isolated populations. In genebanks.
- Effects of different irrigation systems on the biodiversity of species-rich hay meadows. Change from the traditional irrigation system has affected biodiversity levels, but not a huge amount.
- Research regarding the use of wheat biodiversity for obtaining some cereal-based fermented mashes. Let’s go straight to what we need to know here: the best mash come from spelt wheat. Oh, to be the one doing the organoleptic characterization.
- Cultivation and high capitalization of medicinal and aromatic plants in the Romanian-Bulgarian cross-border region. If you’re really interested, there’s a database that brings it all together.
- Crop biodiversity, productivity and production risk: Panel data micro-evidence from Ethiopia. More crops = more production. But the devil is in the details, I suspect.
- Identification of gaps in pearl millet germplasm from East and Southern Africa conserved at the ICRISAT genebank. We used to do this sort of thing by hand in my day.
- At3g08030 transcript: a molecular marker of seed ageing. This mRNA could predict germination performance of a dry seed lot across species. Good for genebanks?
- Assembling a core collection from the flax world collection maintained by Plant Gene Resources of Canada. You don’t hear much about core collections these days, why is that?
Nibbles: Agriculture and climate change and GM and nutrition
- Farmers are “the canaries in the mine when it comes to climate change,” says The Financial Times. Get the whole report as a PDF.
- Bioversity says it has climate change covered with a new Seeds for Needs project. Is there an echo in here?
- Farming First covers climate change in an infographic.
- Avenue of the Baobabs in Madagascar burnt down. Better edit those factsheets.
- Heirloom maize farmers talk sense on GM corn shock …
- … but Punjab doesn’t care. Invites Monsanto “To put agriculture diversification on the fast track”.
- Jessica Fanzo wins the Carasso Prize for her great research on nutrition. Proud to call her a friend.
- There was a roundtable associated with the Carasso Prize. Lawrence Haddad blogs about it.
- Pity that roundtable clashed with Workshop: ‘Adding Value to Local Foods for Food and Nutrition Security: Myth or Strategic Option’ in the Caribbean.
- Will the Caribbean warm to finger millet? Zester Daily just wants to share the gluten-free goodness.
- Bere whisky. No, you read that right. Bere as in barley, not as in beer. But then, barley is in beer. Where’s an etymologist when you need one?
And we’ve got nutrition in spades:
Brainfood: Pig genome, Turkey genome, Big genomes, Maize genome, Potato improvement, Mango diversity, Coconut germination
- Analyses of pig genomes provide insight into porcine demography and evolution. More wild diversity in Asia, suggesting origin there, followed by migration to Europe. Separate domestication in SE Asia and Europe, followed by geneflow.
- Whole genome SNP discovery and analysis of genetic diversity in Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo). Lot less diverse than chicken. Or pig. Commercial breed even less diverse.
- Why size really matters when sequencing plant genomes. We must not shy away from the big genomes.
- QTL mapping in three tropical maize populations reveals a set of constitutive and adaptive genomic regions for drought tolerance. Eureka!
- Crops that feed the world 8: Potato: are the trends of increased global production sustainable? Maybe. But can you guess what will be needed? Nice review of genebank holdings and improvement strategies and aims.
- Physico-chemical Characterization of Unexploited Mango Diversity in Sub-mountane Zone of Northern India. 28 varieties in the Punjab, with all kinds of different uses.
- Germination Rate is the Significant Characteristic Determining Coconut Palm Diversity. Natural and artificial selection associated with different rates of germination (as well as other phenotypic traits of course).
It’s germplasm evaluation, Jim, but not as we know it
Next generation sequencing (NGS) holds the promise for a more efficient approach to germplasm evaluation whereby a carefully selected subset of accessions can be sequenced and phenotyped in detail; associations discovered between genotypes and phenotypes in this subset could be used to predict the phenotype of other accessions based on sequence data alone.
Ah, “the promise.” Always the promise. But actually, in this document, “Technical appraisal of strategic approaches to large-scale germplasm evaluation,” some of the practicalities are spelled out, and in quite a lot of detail. You be the judge of whether the vision outlined in that opening quote is of a far-away, Star Trek world, or something that’s really just around the next corner. You can comment on the document itself, or here if you prefer.