Who says there’s no agricultural diversity in American supermarkets?
Nibbles: ABS, Climate change and crops, Beer proteome, Cattle SNPs, Nepal genebank, Sceletium tortuosum, CBD, Weeds, Vitamin A
- Indian academics voice some reservations about CBD ABS regime. Maybe a multilateral approach would be better?
- CIAT warns about climate change effect on crops. Kenyan farmers know all about that. And Koreans too. Oh, and speaking of kimchi…
- Beer proteome means better beer. Fundamental research indeed.
- Cattle breeds are real. And the gaur?
- Nepal inaugurates genebank.
- San benefit from bioprospecting license for medicinal plant.
- Ahmed Djoghlaf says…
- Weeds? Not weeds. Cities as biodiversity hotspots? Oh I give up.
- Orange cassava due to one amino acid.
Nibbles: Melongena, Nutrition, Wheat, Pavlovsk, Farming, Phosphate, Lesotho, Almonds
- “Its flavor is like the saliva generously exchanged by lovers in kissing.” Yum!
- ECOWAS Nutrition Forum continues to sell “multi-sectoral approach to tackling under-nutrition” in West Africa.
- Six new varieties of wheat in Oman! Splitters rule.
- US scientists urged Russians to save Pavlovsk. Lotta continua.
- And here’s the Russian Housing Development Foundation’s take on the expert report. Lotta continua sempre.
- COPs may come and COPs may go — but will we be ready for the Peasant Olympics in 2012? h/t Miss Hathorn.
- Phosphates in China: waste ’em while you can?
- Book: Conservation agriculture and sustainable crop intensification in Lesotho.
- Australian almond variety not performing this year.
Nibbles:Collecting missions, Grapes, Beans, Genome, Local markets, Water
- From GBDBH, a light glimmers: browse and search records of crop collecting missions.
- “Variations in early-season temperatures may alter substantially grapevine yield formation.” For Cab Sauv at any rate.
- Mixture of beans as good as resistant variety against anthracnose disease.
- Genome inversion spurs ecotypic differentiation.
- A review of medicinal plant markets.
- Today’s huge global dataset: “threats to human water security and freshwater biodiversity in global river systems.”
The geography of black rice
Sometimes it pays to spend some time in Genebank Database Hell, if you can fight through the pain.
You may remember a piece recently about the antioxidant properties of black rice. But where does black rice come from? Well, hanging around with the Genesys and GRIN-Global crowd in the past couple of days has allowed me to come up with this map in answer to that deceptively simple question.
In yellow are all the rice accessions from Asia which have coordinates, as recorded in the IRRI database, EURISCO and GRIN. In red are the black rice accessions.
You’d have thought such a map would be pretty easy to make. But you’d be wrong. I had to get an Excel spreadsheet from IRRI with the characterization data, ((For which many thanks!)) and mash it up with the passport data in Genesys for the same accessions, and then export two separate kmz files and fiddle around in Google Earth. ((Thanks to Google for the Pro license!)) Well, they don’t call it Genebank Database Hell for nothing. But it is getting better, slowly but surely.