- Agricultural landscapes and biodiversity in China. Traditional farming practices good for biodiversity, modern bad. Therefore need intensification, to take pressure off natural habitats. But no, wait, that usually means monocultures and chemicals, which are bad. Oh crap. No mention of genebanks.
- Innovation in input supply systems in smallholder agroforestry: seed sources, supply chains and support systems. Decentralized commercial system probably best for getting quality agroforestry seed to smallholders. Unfortunately, nobody listening.
- Characterization of Italian lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) germplasm by agronomic traits, biochemical and molecular markers. I object in principle to any paper that says a particular landrace is “the best.”
- The relationship between heterosis and genetic distances based on RAPD and AFLP markers in carrot. It is positive. Was this really not known before in carrots? What am I missing?
- Genetic diversity of taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott) in Vanuatu (Oceania): an appraisal of the distribution of allelic diversity (DAD) with SSR markers. 10 villages, 344 landraces, 324 distinct multilocus genotypes, genetic pattern reflects social networks. Situation in Andaman Islands not quite so interesting.
- A study of genetic diversity among Indian bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) cultivars released during last 100 years. More diversity after Green Revolution than before, but steadily decreasing.
- Ex situ conservation genetics: a review of molecular studies on the genetic consequences of captive breeding programmes for endangered animal species. Restricted access, and you know what? I couldn’t care less.
- Consequences of wooded shrine rituals on vegetation conservation in West Africa: a case study from the Bwaba cultural area (West Burkina Faso). I expect there are some, but with restricted access, what’s the point of even linking?
- Evaluating sweet potato as an intervention food to prevent Vitamin A deficiency. To have an effect, you’d have to replace all the other types with orange-fleshed ones. Well, almost. Wonder whether it will be presented at the “International Scientific Symposium on Food & Nutrition Security Information: From valid measurement to effective decision-making” early next year.
- Evaluation of variability of morphological traits of selected caraway (Carum carvi L.) genotypes. They’re actually breeding this stuff in Poland. But they had to get their germplasm from botanical gardens around Europe.
- Variation in baobab seedling morphology and its implications for selecting superior planting material. There is some.
- Edible Neotropical blueberries: antioxidant and compositional fingerprint analysis. The 5 species involved have different ones.
- Population genomics and speciation in yeasts. There’s a question as to whether yeast species in fact exist in any meaningful sense.
- Cereal–forage rotations effect on biochemical characteristics of topsoil and productivity of the crops in Mediterranean environment. Continuous cereal stressed the soil.
Nibbles: IBC18, Sustainable intensification, Macadamia, Endangered turtle, Transgenic grass skirts
- More on #IBC18 from AoB. Web 2.0 as it should be.
- EurActive.com with massive dossier on sustainable intensification in Europe. Not much diversification there, though, except for intercropping.
- Boffins look for wild macadamias with thinner shells for wimpy consumers. Well, not just that.
- The ancient Maya mixed up their turtles.
- Grass skirts latest GMO fear.
Unlocking agriculture’s past to feed the future world
That’s the title of a talk our friend and occasional contributor Jacob van Etten will give in the National Geographic store in Madrid next week, on the 28th to be precise. If you can’t be there in person, you can follow Jacob online. And if that doesn’t work, no doubt he’ll tell us here how it all went. I just hope he explains to National Geographic the difference between a potato and an oca. In fact, why not open with that, Jacob? That’ll grab their attention.
Brainfood: Pollinators, Cattle foraging, Sweet potato-pig system, Kava quality, Pastures, Pollen flow, Agrarian reform, Genotype diversity, Cacao cropping, Outcrossing
- Contribution of pollinator-mediated crops to nutrients in the human food supply. 90% of Vitamin C for a start.
- Foraging behavior of Alberes cattle in a Mediterranean forest ecosystem. It’s a semi-feral breed in NE Spain and its foraging behaviour may well decrease the risk of fires.
- Assessing the impact of the SASA/CASREN technology interventions in the sweet potato-pig production systems in Zitong County (Sichuan, China). All well and good but in this day and age one would expect some exploration of the sustainability of the interventions.
- Proposal for a Kava Quality Standardization Code. Very much needed because poor quality was probably responsible for examples of liver toxicity in the past. This is how to avoid that in the future.
- Clipping stimulates productivity but not diversity in improved and semi-natural pastures in temperate Japan. Semi-natural pastures are more diverse than improved pastures, and can be reasonably productive. So there.
- Pollen flows within and between rice and millet fields in relation to farmer variety development in The Gambia. Depends on breeding system. Likely higher within fields than between. Still no cure for cancer.
- Land, landlords and sustainable livelihoods: The impact of agrarian reform on a coconut hacienda in the Philippines. It seems to be mainly in the mind.
- Genetic divergence is not the same as phenotypic divergence. It isn’t? I’ll alert the media.
- Scope economies and technical efficiency of cocoa agroforesty systems in Ghana. Multi-crop cocoa farms are better, in multiple ways.
- Gene flow increases fitness at the warm edge of a species’ range. Outcrossing between edge populations better for living on the edge than outcrossing within edge populations, outcrossing with a center population or selfing. For a Californian annual anyway. Interesting consequences for in situ CWR conservation, in particular in context of re-introductions. Do we worry too much about “genetic pollution”?
Quinoa phylogenetics unraveled
Our regular reader and occasional contributor Eve Emshwiller informs us that her student Brian Walsh has won the award for best student poster from the Economic Botany Section of the Botanical Society of America at Botany 2011 in St. Louis. Here’s the abstract. There’s some talk of the poster itself perhaps being made available online in due course. Fingers crossed.
Phylogeny of American Chenopodium species with focus on origins of the domesticated taxa.
The edible seeds of quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa, Amaranthaceae) have gained popularity worldwide, based on nutritional qualities and ease of growing. Most people do not know quinoa is one of four cultigens of Chenopodium domesticated in the Americas: C. quinoa and C. pallidicaule from South America, C. berlandieri ssp. nuttalliae from Mesoamerica, and the extinct C. berlandieri ssp. jonesianum recovered from archaeological sites throughout eastern North America. Despite nearly 100 years of debate researchers still do not agree on the relationship among these domesticates. Conflicting hypotheses have been proposed asserting whether cultigens were domesticated independently or represent introductions into neighboring regions. Alternative hypotheses suggest two, three, or four independent domestications of Chenopodium in the Americas, and proposed several putative wild progenitors of the cultigens. To investigate the relationships among cultigens of Chenopodium and assess potential wild progenitors, a phylogenetic framework of the genus emphasizing New World species is required. Phylogenetic analyses of DNA sequences of non-coding loci, both nuclear (SOS1 intron 17, COS at103, ITS) and plastid (trnQ-rps16, trnL-trnT, ndhJ-trnF-trnL, psbD-trnT, and psbM-ycf6), were conducted using parsimony, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian analyses. Taxon sampling includes 19 Chenopodium species from North and South America, with focus on the extant cultigens and subspecific taxa within C. berlandieri.
Findings include the following: Chenopodium pallidicaule is genetically distinct from other extant cultigens.
Sampled cultivars of the Mesoamerican cultigen, C. berlandieri ssp. nuttalliae, unite in a single subclade, nested within, but distinct from wild C. berlandieri.
Chenopodium quinoa is nested within the C. berlandieri complex, but not within the C. berlandieri ssp. nuttalliae clade. Interestingly, the southern-most range of wild C. berlandieri is southern Mexico, whereas quinoa is cultivated in Eduador, Peru, and Bolivia. These findings are consistent with independent domestications of the extant cultigens. Using nucleotide markers unique to C. berlandieri ssp. nuttalliae, ancient-DNA analyses will be conducted to determine the relationship of the extinct cultigen, C. berlandieri ssp. jonesianum.