- Beyond the binary: Queer inclusion and invisible labour in Samoa’s fisheries value chains. Fisheries in Samoa depend on significant but largely unrecognized labour by LGBTQ+ people, particularly fa’afafine and fa’afatama, whose contributions are overlooked by policies based on rigid gender categories.
- Genetic and morphological diversity of indigenous chicken of Kenya: A Review. Kenya’s indigenous chickens are adapted to diverse environments, resilient to disease, and important for rural livelihoods.
- Uncovering the lives of rock doves (Columba livia) in Late Bronze Age Hala Sultan Tekke, Cyprus. Rock doves lived alongside people in a major Late Bronze Age port city, revealing a more complex relationship than simple domestication in which doves exploited urban environments while providing food and other resources.
- Farmed Escapees Threaten MHC Diversity in Wild Atlantic Salmon. Escaped farmed Atlantic salmon can erode the diversity of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes in wild populations through interbreeding, which could reduce the long-term resilience and adaptability of wild salmon.
- Creation of intermuscular bone-free genetic mutants in grass carp and multiomics reveals molecular regulatory basis. Genome editing was used to produce grass carp lacking the numerous fine intermuscular bones that reduce consumer appeal, opening new possibilities for breeding more marketable fish while deepening understanding of skeletal biology.
Nibbles: Cayman coconuts, Wild beans, Breeding Bambara, Aussie genebank, UAE law, EBI, Amazonian ag
- The Cayman Islands bets on a genebank of coconut diversity.
- The Alliance of Bioversity & CIAT’s genebank bets on growth cabinets to save picky wild bean.
- IITA bets on stakeholders to build a better Bambara groundnut. And its genebank, presumably.
- The Australian Seed Bank Partnership bets on, well, seeds.
- The UAE bets on a PGRFA law.
- Ethiopia bet on a national genebank 50 years ago.
- People have been betting on the chagra in the Amazon for 4,500 years.
Brainfood: Seeds through time
- Natufian sickle blades (ca. 15,000–11,700 cal. BP) reveal cereal cultivation ca. 4.5 millennia before domestication. Archaeological evidence from ancient sickle blades suggests that people were harvesting cereal seeds thousands of years before domesticated forms emerged, blurring the line between foraging and farming, and offering fresh insight into the long co-evolution of humans and crops.
- Teosinte alleles enhance nitrogen assimilation and seed protein in maize. Wild relatives continue to provide valuable genetic resources for the improvement of crop seeds.
- Modeling seed germination data to meet biodiversity conservation needs in the Mediterranean. Robust germination models can improve both restoration planning and ex situ conservation by predicting when and how seeds are most likely to establish.
- To grow or not to grow: questioning seed dormancy and thermal germination responses along elevational gradients in four plant taxa. Seed dormancy does not always follow predictable patterns across environmental gradients.
- Delayed Seed Germination as a Strategy to Cope With Environmental Stress and Disturbance. Seed dormancy follows a (fairly) predictable pattern when you look at stress and disturbance.
- Reconsidering how to dry orthodox seeds for improved ex situ conservation outcomes. Conventional wisdom about drying orthodox seeds before storage may deserve re-evaluation, and refining drying protocols could enhance long-term viability and strengthen the effectiveness of seed banks.
- Short periods dominate mast seeding across diverse tree species. A broad analysis of mast seeding reveals that many tree species synchronize seed production over relatively short recurring intervals rather than highly irregular cycles.
Nibbles: NSW genebank, Ghana genebank, Community seed bank standards, Kenya legislation, Valuing diversity, BBC on potato, Ube yams in Philippines, Strawberry anatomy and history
- Another genebank in Australia. Unclear how it relates to the existing ones.
- Ghana’s genebank in funding trouble.
- How to run a community seed bank, according to the Bureau of Indian Standards. Apparently includes things like its relationship with other genebanks and funding.
- How to change legislation in Kenya to be more supportive of genebanks.
- Why we need genebanks in the first place.
- Otherwise decent podcast on the potato manages not to mention genebanks.
- Otherwise decent article on ube (Dioscorea alata) manages not to mention genebanks.
- Otherwise excellent dissection of the strawberry manages not to mention genebanks.
Brainfood: Unusual data edition
- The Broad Spectrum Species: Plant Use and Processing as Deep Time Adaptations. Hundreds of plant species, many now forgotten, show up in archaeological assemblages stretching back tens of thousands of years. Exploiting an astonishing diversity of plants was a fundamental human adaptation long before agriculture. And the data was kinda always there.
- Evaluating cultivars for pollinator gardens. Some ornamental cultivars attract more pollinators than the wild plants they were bred from. The relationship between genetic modification through breeding and ecological function is not always straightforward. And I now want to see the descriptor “pollinator attractiveness” in evaluation datasets.
- Chemotypic Diversity and Integrated Metabolic Profiling of Myrtle (Myrtus communis L.) from Mediterranean Turkey. Dozens of different chemical compounds vary dramatically among individual myrtle plants that look much the same to the naked eye.
- Essential oil composition and ethnobotanical survey of male and female Juniperus seravschanica Kom. (Cupressaceae) in Iran. Traditional knowledge and chemical profiling show that juniper male shoots, female shoots and cones each produce distinct blends of essential oils, exposing a surprising layer of sex-linked diversity within a single species.
- Earth Metabolome and Digital Botanical Gardens Initiatives: Chemodiversity Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation. Millions of plant-produced molecules remain undocumented, forming an invisible dimension of biodiversity. We need global digital infrastructures to catalogue this vast reservoir of chemodiversity before it disappears. Of course we do.
- Herbaria Provide a Valuable Resource for Obtaining Informative mRNA. Decades-old herbarium specimens still contain usable messenger RNA, opening the door to studying historical patterns of gene expression from preserved plant collections.
- The Politics of Open Infrastructures: Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices. Data infrastructures may be open, but control over them often is not. And that probably goes even more for the unusual sorts of data represented by the above papers than for the crop diversity data we normally deal with here.