- Symbiotic fungus can help plants and detoxify methylmercury.
- Very attractive book on the wild tomatoes of Peru. I wonder if any of them eat heavy metals.
- There’s a new dataset on the world’s terrestrial ecosystems. I’d like to know which one has the most crop wild relative species per unit area. Has anyone done that calculation? They must have.
- Iran sets up a saffron genebank. Could have sworn they already had one.
- The Natural History Museum digs up some old wheat samples, the BBC goes a bit crazy with it.
- Paleolithic diets included plants. Maybe not wheat or saffron though.
- Community seedbanks are all the rage in Odisha.
- Seeds bring UK and South Africa closer together. Seeds in seedbanks. Not community seedbanks, perhaps, but one can hope.
- Can any of the above make agriculture any more nutrition-sensitive? I’d like to think yes. Maybe except for the mercury-eating fungus, though you never know…
Brainfood: Silkworm, Donkey, Cat, Chicken, Neolithic, Shamans, Locusts
- High-resolution silkworm pan-genome provides genetic insights into artificial selection and ecological adaptation. The silkworm was domesticated 5000 years ago in the middle Yellow River (along with millets?), but was improved independently and in different directions in China and Japan.
- The genomic history and global expansion of domestic donkeys. The donkey was domesticated in the Horn of Africa 7000 years ago and then developed in different directions in Africa and Eurasia. Covered in the NY Times, no less.
- Your horse is a donkey! Identifying domesticated equids from Western Iberia using collagen fingerprinting. Turns out you can tell horses and donkeys apart easily and cheaply from ancient collagen in archaeological remains.
- Genetics of randomly bred cats support the cradle of cat domestication being in the Near East. Humans were domesticated by cats in the eastern Mediterranean basin about 12,000 years ago.
- The history of the domestic cat in Central Europe. Wait, the Near Eastern wildcat, from which all domestic cats are derived, could have been in central Europe before the Neolithic.
- Missing puzzle piece for the origins of domestic chickens. Recent dating of chicken domestication from archaeological remains in Thailand at 1650–1250 BC underestimates the timescale. By a lot.
- Was the Fishing Village of Lepenski Vir Built by Europe’s First Farmers? And did they have cats?
- Shamanism at the transition from foraging to farming in Southwest Asia: sacra, ritual, and performance at Neolithic WF16 (southern Jordan). You need shamans to help you cope with all that animal domestication.
- Contributions of black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia L.) to livelihoods of peri-urban dwellers in the Free State Province of South Africa. Wait, black locusts are not animals? Hmm, they do seem to have some things in common with cats though.
Nibbles: Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Hemp collection, Community seedbank, Turkish national genebank, Olive park, Pillas, CIMMYT genebank
- A Canadian take on Svalbard.
- A Texas take on hemp conservation.
- A Zimbabwean take on community seedbanks.
- A Turkish take on genebanks.
- An Italian take on olive conservation.
- A Cornish take on heirloom oats.
- A Chinese take on the CIMMYT genebank.
Brainfood: Genetic erosion, Ecosystem services, Cereal mixtures, Natural enemies, Soil microbiome double
- Genetic diversity loss in the Anthropocene. Don’t get excited, I don’t think the method translates to cultivated species, but fancy maths says we’ve lost on average 10% of the genetic diversity within species.
- A graphical causal model for resolving species identity effects and biodiversity–ecosystem function correlations. Yeah, but don’t forget that species level diversity is important too. Or rather, diversity of functional traits among species.
- Cereal species mixtures: an ancient practice with potential for climate resilience. A review. Species level diversity in the same farmer’s field is being forgotten, and that’s bad.
- Microbiomes in agroecosystem: Diversity, function and assembly mechanisms. Even soil microbial diversity is important…
- Association analyses of host genetics, root-colonizing microbes, and plant phenotypes under different nitrogen conditions in maize. …but the effects of soil microbial diversity can get quite complicated, and interact with the genetic diversity of crop plants. Which we may or may not have lost an average 10% of.
- Direct and indirect effects of management and landscape on biological pest control and crop pest infestation in apple orchards. Yeah, but species diversity can be bad too.
Pulse evaluation set to INCREASE
As we’ve noted a couple of times here, the INCREASE project (Intelligent Collections of Food Legumes Genetic Resources for European Agrofood Systems) includes a fantastic citizen science component. If you’re interested in taking part, registration for the third phase opens in a few days.
