- GAIN Discussion Paper 9: Food group diversity and nutrient adequacy. Eat a diverse diet…
- Can Underutilized Tropical Fruits Meet the Nutritional Requirements of Rural Indonesia? …which includes fruits, of course.
- The nutritional quality of cereals varies geospatially in Ethiopia and Malawi. And cereals, though it depends where they’re growing.
- Variation for Photoperiod and Temperature Sensitivity in the Global Mini Core Collection of Sorghum. Less than 10% are sensitive to neither. And yes, there’s another paper on the nutrient quality of the same subset. Though not on how that varies geographically.
- Habitat value of bivalve shellfish and seaweed aquaculture for fish and invertebrates: Pathways, synthesis and next steps. Eat more bivalves and seaweed too, it can be good for the environment too.
- Measurements of lethal and nonlethal inbreeding depression inform the de novo domestication of Silphium integrifolium. Always good to have a new oil crop, especially a perennial one, but careful what you cross to get it, and how.
- Genome design of hybrid potato. Re-inventing the potato as a seed-propagated crop could be good for nutrition, sure, why not.
- High Throughput can produce better decisions than high accuracy when phenotyping plant populations. As you make better and more nutritious crops, keep in mind it may be better to phenotype more plants in more environments than obsess about accuracy and precision. What does that mean for mini-cores?
- Insight into the introduction of domestic cattle and the process of Neolithization to the Spanish region Galicia by genetic evidence. But is any of this worth the hassle? After all, the early domesticated cattle of Galicia are similar to modern breeds…
Brainfood: Food systems & biodiversity, Tree diversity, Cereal micronutrients, African crops in America, Coffee vulnerability, Coffee fungus, Wildrice, Wild coriander, Wild apple genebank, Laperrine’s olive, Maize landraces, Goat domestication, Honey bee cryo
- Biodiversity Towards Sustainable Food Systems: Four Arguments. For the record: food/nutrition security, climate change resilience, sustainable diets, resilience to zoonoses. I would have added something about culture.
- Biodiversity–productivity relationships are key to nature-based climate solutions. Greenhouse gas mitigation helps tree diversity helps productivity helps greenhouse gas mitigation.
- Genetic determinants of micronutrient traits in graminaceous crops to combat hidden hunger. Big crops can help little crops.
- Contributions of African Crops to American Culture and Beyond: The Slave Trade and Other Journeys of Resilient Peoples and Crops. Decolonizing American agriculture.
- Vulnerability of coffee (Coffea spp.) genetic resources in the United States. Americans have a cunning plan for an African crop.
- Historical genomics reveals the evolutionary mechanisms behind multiple outbreaks of the host-specific coffee wilt pathogen Fusarium xylarioides. Coffee Wilt Disease fungus got a boost from banana Panama Disease fungus. Got a plan for this?
- Improved Remote Sensing Methods to Detect Northern Wild Rice (Zizania palustris L.). They’re this close to putting in place an early warning system. Coffee next? But what about those micronutrients, eh?
- Wild coriander: an untapped genetic resource for future coriander breeding. Not only untapped, its very existence was in doubt. Detect this from space, Colin!
- Advanced genebank management of genetic resources of European wild apple, Malus sylvestris, using genome-wide SNP array data. The Dutch field collection can be managed as a single unit. Kind of a relief, probably. Coffee next?
- Contrasting Genetic Footprints among Saharan Olive Populations: Potential Causes and Conservation Implications. Looks like the wild Saharan olive cannot be managed as a single unit. Bet they can be monitored from space though.
- Growing maize landraces in industrialized countries: from the search for seeds to the emergence of new practices and values. Two contrasting approaches by farmers’ associations in France and Italy.
- Herded and hunted goat genomes from the dawn of domestication in the Zagros Mountains. Before goats were morphologically domesticated, they were managed and genetically domesticated. I wonder if coffee was the same.
- Europe’s First Gene Bank for Honey Bees. Really cold drone semen finds a home in Germany.
Brainfood: INCREASE, Bean geneflow, Potato geneflow, Rhodes Grass diversity, Tritordeum, Ivory Coast PGRFA access, Thai rice diversity, Local food, Indian rice breeding, Genetic diversity metric, Grapevine rootstocks
- Intelligent Characterization of Lentil Genetic Resources: Evolutionary History, Genetic Diversity of Germplasm, and the Need for Well-Represented Collections. Basically a set of protocols for producing, documenting and maintaining single-seed descended (SSD) pure lines. For beans too. Courtesy of the INCREASE project.
- Gene Flow in Phaseolus Beans and Its Role as a Plausible Driver of Ecological Fitness and Expansion of Cultigens. The diversity in the wild-weedy-crop complexes should be studied and conserved.
- Natural and Cultural Processes Influencing Gene Flow Among Wild (atoq papa), Weedy (araq papa and k’ipa papa), and Crop Potatoes in the Andean Region of Southern Peru. Indigenous communities seem to be doing just that for potatoes in the Andes.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of a Rhodes Grass (Chloris gayana) Collection. From 104 accessions in the ILRI genebank to a core collection of 21 in 2 genetic clusters. No word on SSD.
- Tritordeum: Creating a New Crop Species—The Successful Use of Plant Genetic Resources. That would be Hordeum chilense x durum wheat. Quite the wild-weedy complex.
- Systems of Genetic Resources Exchange in Côte D’Ivoire and its Evolution: Case Study of Food Crops Such as Yam, Cassava, Rice and Plantain. Lots of material has come into the country from CGIAR centres, except for yams.
- Estimation of the Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Thailand’s Rice Landraces Using SNP Markers. Two geographic subgroups within indica. No word on influx of material from CGIAR.
- The sustainability of “local” food: a review for policy-makers. Local food does not necessarily mean environmentally, socially or economically sustainable food. I guess that may go for genetic resources too (see above)?
- Rice breeding in India: eight decades of journey towards enhancing the genetic gain for yield, nutritional quality, and commodity value. QED.
- Global Commitments to Conserving and Monitoring Genetic Diversity Are Now Necessary and Feasible. Phew.
- Grapevine rootstocks affect growth-related scion phenotypes. It’s not just about the genetic diversity. But still.
Nibbles: Apples, Millets, Miniatures, Transhumance, Ag origins, Seeds
Brainfood: Sorghum rescue, Barley mixtures, Agroecology, Tepary genome, DSI x 2, Cryo guac, Seed regulation, Recipe design, White clover diversity, IK wheat, High maize
- The recent evolutionary rescue of a staple crop depended on over half a century of global germplasm exchange. Sorghum in Haiti was saved from pest by breeders mixing up material from all over the place.
- Does crop genetic diversity support positive biodiversity effects under experimental drought? Not straightforwardly, at least for barley cultivar mixtures in pots.
- A Nutrition-Sensitive Agroecology Intervention in Rural Tanzania Increases Children’s Dietary Diversity and Household Food Security But Does Not Change Child Anthropometry: Results from a Cluster-Randomized Trial. Well at least it’s more straightforward than the above.
- The tepary bean genome provides insight into evolution and domestication under heat stress. Better heat adaptation than common bean, but less disease and pest resistance.
- The international political process around Digital Sequence Information under the Convention on Biological Diversity and the 2018–2020 intersessional period. Can’t take the above for granted.
- Practical consequences of digital sequence information (DSI) definitions and access and benefit‐sharing scenarios from a plant genebank’s perspective. Genebanks trying not to take the above for granted.
- Cryopreservation of Woody Crops: The Avocado Case. There’s been a breakthrough in shoot tip cryopreservation.
- Using Regulatory Flexibility to Address Market Informality in Seed Systems: A Global Study. Regulatory flexibility would certainly be a breakthrough for linking formal and informal seed systems. And, incidentally, not bad for DSI either.
- A recipe development process model designed to support a crop’s sensory qualities. When you want to make a recipe for a new ingredient (crop or heirloom variety), start with what makes the ingredient special, not with what might make the end-product special.
- Genetic diversity and population structure analysis in a large collection of white clover (Trifolium repens L.) germplasm worldwide. Native and introduced populations are genetically differentiated.
- Limited haplotype diversity underlies polygenic trait architecture across 70 years of wheat breeding. Crunch time for UK wheat breeders: continue shuffling within the existing diversity, or expand it?
- Molecular Parallelism Underlies Convergent Highland Adaptation of Maize Landraces. Adaptation to high altitude from the SW US to the Andes was due to wild genes from the Mexican highlands.