- C4 rice: it’s really very, very complicated. And Ford Denison on the reason. Kinda.
- Speaking of tradeoffs, this tomato taste vs colour story is everywhere. What is it about the (lack of) taste of tomatoes that gets people so riled up? And I wonder what the ones grown in Alaska taste like.
- I International Symposium on Wild Relatives of Subtropical and Temperate Fruit and Nut Crops: the abstracts are online. Does it include the tomato. Nope, not getting into that one.
- There are several subtropical and temperate fruit involved in Peruvian cuisine. Right? Come on, help me out with these segues.
Nibbles: Impact evaluation reviews, Coffee podcast, Pretty on sustainable intensification, Patient capital, Searching for species names, Searching in general, Palestinian agriculture, Korean Neolithic, Mesquite in Africa, CIMMYT-China, Banana trade, UK plant science, Breadfruit, Weed, Beans in Mexico, Macadamia, Organic Cali
- How to do impact evaluation. Required reading.
- Podcast on the history of coffee from Linn. Soc. Required listening.
- How to intensify agriculture sustainably. Meah.
- It may well involve patient capital though.
- This thing will look for all the species names in a piece of text or website. Bound to come in useful one of these days.
- How to use Google properly. And a vaguely agricultural quiz to see if you’ve been listening in class.
- Protecting ancient irrigation system on the West Bank.
- And finding the oldest agricultural site in East Asia.
- The good and bad side of Prosopis in Africa.
- CIMMYT in China.
- The banana as a weapon.
- Touring UK plant science sites.
- Mapping breadfruit to save the world.
- “Over 78 million Europeans (15–64 years) have tried cannabis…” Purely medicinal purposes, man.
- “We wanted to see how farmers are reacting to this global climate change…” Bean farmers, not cannabis farmers.
- If you’re at the Noosa Botanic Gardens, Cooroy, you can see rare macadamias. Yeah but can you smoke ’em?
- Organic seed systems in California. No, not cannabis, settle down.
Collecting manual for plant genetic resources updated and online
Collecting plant genetic diversity is one of those great fat handbooks essential for anyone interested in, er, collecting plant genetic diversity. New it’ll set you back USD230. What’s more, the information in that dead-tree edition is truly ancient, much of it dating back to before 1995. But here’s good news. A brand-spanking new (and almost complete) version is available for your online edification, and our very own Luigi Guarino remains one of its editors. Old information has been updated. New information has been included. The whole thing can be downloaded (and printed, if you must). What’s more, “the editors invite your comments”.
What are you waiting for?
Brainfood: Synthetic wheat, Pisum, Maize products, Seed predation, Cajanus, Tripsacum, Horse domestication, Cicer genomics, Cereal vulnerability, Allotments, Conservation units, Chilie diversity, Endophytes
- Sources of resistance in primary synthetic hexaploid wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) to insect pests: Hessian fly, Russian wheat aphid and Sunn pest in the fertile crescent. Domestication do-over continues to show promise. Closest thing to a jetpack?
- Evaluation of seed yield and seed yield components in red–yellow (Pisum fulvum) and Ethiopian (Pisum abyssinicum) peas. Weird pea species show promise in Serbia, of all places.
- Consumer preferences for maize products in urban Kenya. Most still like it white. Not much promise there.
- Bush pig (Potamochoerus porcus) seed predation of bush mango (Irvingia gabonensis) and other plant species in Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s pretty unpromising for seeds, especially right under the tree.
- Phenotypic diversity in Cajanus species and identification of promising sources for agronomic traits and seed protein content. 14 accessions of 8 seem promising (out of a total of 198 accessions of 18 species from the ICRISAT collection).
- Genetic relations among Tripsacum species revealed by genomic variation. They might be promising.
- Reconstructing the origin and spread of horse domestication in the Eurasian steppe. Wild Equus ferus moves out of eastern Eurasian steppe 160 kya, shows promise, gets domesticated in the western part, but continues to introgress with local wild horses as it moves out from there.
- Large-scale development of cost-effective SNP marker assays for diversity assessment and genetic mapping in chickpea and comparative mapping in legumes. What can I tell you. It’s large-scale. It’s cost effective. It’s promising. I’m still waiting for my jetpack.
- The socioeconomics of food crop production and climate change vulnerability: a global scale quantitative analysis of how grain crops are sensitive to drought. It’s the middle income countries that are especially vulnerable, and thus where all that promise needs to come good.
- Deskilling, agrodiversity, and the seed trade: a view from contemporary British allotments. Please promise to keep open-pollinated heirlooms out of the marketplace.
- Harnessing genomics for delineating conservation units. But you need to combine information from neutral and adaptive markers in fancy ways to fulfill the promise.
- Why are not all chilies hot? A trade-off limits pungency. It’s all about how much water is available.
- Endophytic Insect-Parasitic Fungi Translocate Nitrogen Directly from Insects to Plants. Suppose we better promise to conserve these things too then. And here’s the slightly longer short version.
Nibbles: Plant Cuttings, Millennium Seed Bank, ITPGRFA, siRNA, Zoonoses information, Botanical garden, Rio +20, Italian bees, Brazilian coriander, Sri Lankan rice, International Treaty
- “Times are hard; everybody wants more (but seems to be getting less…)…”
- “The panels will produce enough energy to power all of the bank’s seed stores.”
- “One of the Benefit-sharing Fund’s unique features is the transparent process that governs the allocation of funds. After a wide announcement of each call, all the project proposals received for funding are evaluated according to established scientific criteria by international experts in order to fund the best projects.”
- “Basically we’re going to add bullets (siRNA) to the plants’ defense arsenal. It’s science fiction right now, but if it works, then the lengthy, expensive cleanup process could be shortened to two minutes.”
- “A new website provides examples of policies, institutions and stakeholders involved in the management of zoonoses, collated in a meta-database, together with discussion of cross-cutting themes and case studies to illustrate potential approaches.”
- “…the polka-dotted pumpkins were a hit.”
- “We all know this wasn’t the meeting where world governments were going to rise from the ashes.”
- “The tradition of micro-beekeeping has completely disappeared.”
- “No one buys beans, but they do buy cilantro.”
- “Teaming up with Alex Thanthriarachchi, 62, a reformed militant Marxist, Wijertane is on a mission to promote indigenous varieties of rice and other staples as the best way for Sri Lankan farmers to deal with changing climate.”
- “As a metaphor for itself, the treaty is the seed that is there and has been planted. It now needs to be used by all countries in order to keep sustaining life.”