- Wild camel genetically distinct from the domesticated kind. Well I never.
- Maya tapped into their “sacred groves” to build temples, which did not end well.
- Boffins extract DNA from ancient barley in Upper Egypt, find it was 2-rowed, but derived from a 6-rowed ancestor. No word on whether it was used to make beer, but my guess is yes.
- Large Y chromosome microsatellite study of Eurasian cattle does “not support the recent hypothesis on the origin of Y1 from the local European hybridization of cattle with male aurochsen.” This could run and run.
- I like this idea: a garden of poisons.
- Agroforestry’s coming-of-age party coming up. You going? Let us know.
- Multiple explanations for lactase persistence.
More than a nibble, less than a meal
A rapid round-up of some things that caught my eye.
A paper in Crop Science explores the Spanish national genebank’s collection of beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) in search of diversity. They find it, plus evidence of two New World genepools and some intermediate forms.
Banana farmers in The Philippines have reported good results from a programme on Enhancing Smallholder Banana Production. There are many components to the programme — which has boosted exports to valuable markets in Japan and Korea. Among them, the use of clean planting material produced by tissue culture, a focus on appropriate varieties, and careful management of fertilizer regimes. Incomes are said to have gone up 25%.
Cary Fowler is described by The Guardian as “one of the driving forces behind an international seed bank on the Arctic island of Svalbard”. And more besides, we would add. Anyway, he told a TedGlobal audience in Oxford, England, about the threat to agrobiodiversity.
His namesake apple, the Fowler apple, is still cultivated. Pulling out a book from 1904 of apples grown in the state of New York, the Fowler apple is described as a beautiful fruit, but it is also noted that “it fails to develop in size and quality and is on a whole unsatisfactory.”
Nibbles: India, City chicks, Rooftop gardens, Black cherry, Prairie grasses, Oryza SNP
- ICRISAT recommends diversity to cope with climate change in India.
- US urban farmers “mad as wet hens“. City chicks?
- US urban farmers with a view to die for.
- CWR becomes nuisance when free of soil pathogen.
- Convicts help with germplasm regeneration and multiplication.
- The “gold-standard set of curated polymorphisms” for rice.
Nibbles: Bees, Weeds, Free fruit, Flour, Bombus
- Colony collapse disorder: where are we now?
- Weedkiller diversity essential to maintain weed susceptibility.
- Eat the streets.
- Ancient Grains Flour Blend. A baker asks: Whatever next?
- Bumblebee beauty.
Natural selection at work
“This new forage has great insect resistance”, effused a former colleague, “we just need to eliminate the toxins that keep sheep from eating it.”
Genetically engineered drought-tolerant crops are introduced with great fanfare, only to disappear when they turn out to have low yield under nondrought conditions.
Fascinating post from R. Ford Denison, about how silly old natural selection (apparently) fails to make simple changes that would “obviously” be good for the organism concerned. Denison is very clear, in this post and elsewhere on his blog, about just how hard it is for even clever people to improve on the countless experiments that natural selection has had to work on, especially in agriculture. That’s why I for one am not holding my breath waiting for anyone anywhere to transform a C3 plant into a C4 plant.