- There’s a sort of mycological culinary hotspot in Yunnan… Yeah, I thought that too.
- Signs found of old banana cultivation in Australia. Well, kinda. As in not as old as in PNG, and not mainland Australia.
- Really, really old horse butchery site in southern England excavated. When the Brits ate horses. Well, kinda.
- New wheat is pretty much like old wheat, gluten-wise at least.
- Breeding better apple rootstocks at USDA. A hitherto somewhat neglected aspect of apple genetic conservation and improvement.
- Speaking of USDA, here’s another job.
Brainfood: Global Food Security, Neutral diversity, Bottlenecks, Slovenian lettuce, Swedish apples, Mungbean diversity, Crop suitability, Breeding graph, Herding diet, Cool shit, Seed storage double, Wild quinoa, Mighty wind
- A research vision for food systems in the 2020s: Defying the status quo. Research is necessary but not sufficient.
- Dismantling a dogma: the inflated significance of neutral genetic diversity in conservation genetics. Not all genetic diversity is created equal.
- A re‐evaluation of the domestication bottleneck from archaeogenomic evidence. Not so much a single bottleneck “event” on domestication, as serial bottlenecks post-domestication. Another dogma dismantled?
- Morphological and genetic diversity of Slovene lettuce landrace ‘Ljubljanska ledenka’ (Lactuca sativa L.). Not all iceberg is created equal.
- Genetic Status of the Swedish Central collection of heirloom apple cultivars. Neutral diversity is not completely useless, though?
- Understanding genetic variability in the mungbean (Vigna radiata L.) genepool. It may not be neutral variation, but it’s not associated with geography. If you see what I mean.
- A Land Evaluation Framework for Agricultural Diversification. Soil and climate data –> fancy maths –> pretty good prediction of where you find a crop.
- A unifying concept of animal breeding programs. You can describe any breeding programme by using graph theory. But would it help?
- Molecular and isotopic evidence for milk, meat, and plants in prehistoric eastern African herder food systems. Chemical and isotope analysis of lipids on ceramic shards shows early herding societies had a pretty diverse diet.
- Pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas identified by human fecal biomarkers in coprolites from Paisley Caves, Oregon. Lipids again, this time at the other end of the process, and of the world.
- Identification of novel seed longevity genes related to oxidative stress and seed coat by genome‐wide association studies and reverse genetics. Seeds need to take their antioxidants.
- Evaluation of genetic integrity of pearl millet seeds during aging by genomic-SSR markers. Loss of viability leads to loss of diversity.
- Geographical distribution of quinoa crop wild relatives in the Peruvian Andes: a participatory mapping initiative. Cultivated land is as important as more “natural” ecosystems for quinoa wild relatives.
- Global wind patterns and the vulnerability of wind-dispersed species to climate change. In the tropics, and in the lee of mountains, wind-dispersed species will find it more difficult to reach places with suitable future climates.
Switched on switchgrass
Do you live in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, eastern Indiana, western Ohio, eastern Iowa, western North Dakota, eastern Montana, northern Wisconsin, northern Michigan, or the southern Appalachian mountains? Basically the gappy areas below.
Ok, now, do you have any switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) around where you are? Might look something like this.
If so, Dr David Lowry at Michigan State University would like to hear from you.
NOTE: In the interest of full disclosure, I had to change the photo because I uploaded the wrong species having dowloaded a number of different ones from Wikipedia. Thanks to Dave Wood for pointing that out. I originally did it in a hurry and wasn’t paying close enough attention. Sorry.
Brainfood: Perennial favourites, Feral grapevines, Silky cat, Damaged yams, Maize vs sorghum, Sunflower ecotypes, Fungal diversity, Pacific voyaging, Vitamin seeds, Biogeoinformatics, Natural language, Evaluation, Aquaculture
- Perennial vegetables: A neglected resource for biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and nutrition. Over 600 perennial veggies on 6% of global vegetable cropland.
- Genomic Evidences Support an Independent History of Grapevine Domestication in the Levant. Separate from what happened in the Caucasus, that is.
- Distribution, prevalence and severity of damages caused by nematodes on yam (Dioscorea rotundata) in Nigeria. A quarter of tubers and half of heaps showed nematode symptoms.
- Maize long-term genetic progress explains current dominance over sorghum in Argentina. Follow the money.
- Phenotypic and physiological responses to salt exposure in Sorghum reveal diversity among domesticated landraces. Salinity tolerance was acquired early but then lost in some geographic regions where it wasn’t needed. See what happens when you invest in a crop?
- Massive haplotypes underlie ecotypic differentiation in sunflowers. It’s the recombination-suppressing inversions, stupid.
- GlobalFungi, a global database of fungal occurrences from high-throughput-sequencing metabarcoding studies. Cool. Do landraces of a crop next.
- The earliest domestic cat on the Silk Road. Coincided with rapid urbanization in the 9th century.
- Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement. Yeah, but did Americans go west of their own accord or in Polynesian boats? And did they have sweetpotatoes with them? And cats?
- Genetic markers associated with seed longevity and vitamin E in diverse Aus rice varieties. 5 markers on 4 chromosomes.
- Biogeoinformatics for the management of Farm Animal Genetic Resources (FAnGR). Software for monitoring erosion and detecting locally adapted genotypes. Plus preserve traditional practices.
- Computing on Phenotypic Descriptions for Candidate Gene Discovery and Crop Improvement. Casually talk about a plant in the field –> fancy math –> the plant’s genotype.
- Data synthesis for crop variety evaluation. A review. Focus on ranking. Oh, to mash it up with the above.
- Scenarios for Global Aquaculture and Its Role in Human Nutrition. For aquaculture to contribute to nutrition it needs enabling trade and economic policies. Well I never.
Trying tricot
Interested in participatory variety evaluation? Wanna try triadic comparisons of technologies (tricot)? This little thing might help…
https://twitter.com/RManners3/status/1288731146377932800
More background in this paper and others.
Watch out for downloadable copies in multiple languages on the ClimMob website.