Genetic erosion

May 11, 2016May 11, 2016

CWR front and centre

Screen Shot 2016-05-11 at 8.59.14 AM To coincide with the State of the World’s Plants Symposium, which starts today, Kew have just dropped a monumental report of the same name, complete with fancy website. Nice to see crop wild relatives get a decent amount of space (p. 21) in the section on useful plants. Oh, and the report and symposium come along with some good funding news for Kew.

Speaking of funding for crop wild relatives:

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) today announced a five-year partnership to provide funding to broaden the scope of The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. This will significantly increase knowledge on the extinction risk of more than 28,000 species, including many that are key food sources for a significant portion of the global population.
…
IUCN experts have chosen to focus much of the newly funded research on the populations of plants and fish that billions of people depend on as a vital source of food. These will include species of wild rice and wheat that are crucial to food security because they are the source of genetic material used to increase the yield, fertility and resistance to disease of staple crops produced by farmers across the world.

Don’t see any of this happening even a few years back. Do you?

Prof Kathy Willis @kewgardens @KewScience putting #plants on the map #SOTWP pic.twitter.com/g45pTxZPfk

— David Cope (@DrDrCope) May 11, 2016

May 11, 2016

Nibbles: Fixing food, Diane Medal, Iraq Edens, Camel genetics, Disappearing horses

UNEP video on why we have to change the food system.
Garden Club of America honors breadfruit guru Diane Ragone.
Paradise spared. In Iraq.
No such thing as an isolated dromedary, DNA says.
Horses in Kazakhstan, on the other hand…

May 3, 2016

Nibbles: Coffee strategy, Agroforestry, Superfoods, Cyperus, Potato history, Precious tea, Wheat disease, Crowdfunding conservation

Strategizing about coffee. Over cappuccinos, I suspect.
Treesilience. I like that.
Enough with the superfoods already.
Which is not something anybody ever called tiger nuts.
You can now officially blame the potato for the fall of civilization.
A really expensive cup of tea.
Wheat blast reaches Asia.
Crowdfunding tree conservation on Hawaii.

April 25, 2016April 25, 2016

Brainfood: Lupine seeds, Bangladeshi rice, Biscay anchovy, Sweet cassava, Ancient vetches, Salty adzuki, Maroon crops, Mungbean cores, Cassava genome

Evaluation of thermal, chemical, and mechanical seed scarification methods for 4 Great Basin lupine species. They all need different things.
Exploring novel genetic sources of salinity tolerance in rice through molecular and physiological characterization. A lot of salt-tolerant Bangladeshi landraces cluster together in an aromatic group close to japonica.
No loss of genetic diversity in the exploited and recently collapsed population of Bay of Biscay anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus L.). Effective population size has remained steady, irrespective of census population size.
Molecular characterization of accessions of a rare genetic resource: sugary cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) from Brazilian Amazon. Two distinct genetic groups.
Presence of vetches (Vicia spp.) in agricultural and wild floras of ancient Europe. One of the proto-IndoEuropean roots for the collective name of these things translates as “avoid”.
Salt tolerance in wild relatives of adzuki bean, Vigna angularis (Willd.) Ohwi et Ohashi. Two crossable wild relatives had different salt tolerance mechanisms.
The ‘Botanical Gardens of the Dispossessed’ revisited: richness and significance of Old World crops grown by Suriname Maroons. Some crops are only used in rituals now. But even that’s pretty cool, and better than nothing.
The AVRDC–The World Vegetable Center mungbean (Vigna radiata) core and mini core collections. 1481 (20% of total) accessions chosen by geography and phenotype, then 289 by SSRs.
Sequencing wild and cultivated cassava and related species reveals extensive interspecific hybridization and genetic diversity. And you can also use the results for rubber!

April 19, 2016April 19, 2016

Have your fill of quinoa yet?

Jeremy has followed up his monumental NPR post on the effects of high quinoa prices on Andean growers ((Spoiler alert: They’re not bad, on either livelihoods or nutrition, though it’s not all sweetness and light. And as for the consumer…)), and his subsequent handy round-up right here, with a podcast over at Eat this Podcast. All the key players are duly interviewed, and it’s refreshing to hear the likes of Marc Bellemare, for example, in the flesh, as it were, rather than via tweets. One thing that hasn’t featured much in the discussion of the recent rise in prices is whether it has translated in greater interest in — and resources for — breeding the stuff. Which is not to say there isn’t a certain amount of quinoa breeding already going on. Maybe some of it is even of the gender-sensitive kind, examples of which are, incidentally, being sought by our friends at CGIAR. But more would probably be good. Oh, and conservation of the existing landraces too, of course.