- Drought tolerance? It’s the carbs.
- Whisky 101.
- Coincidental mashup of the above. Barley used in whisky production provides clue to drought tolerance.
- Pre-hispanic veggies.
- Pre-hispanic carbs.
- Pre-hispanic livestock.
- Sustainable agriculture deconstructed.
- GBIF scores Chinese specimens.
Brainfood: Landrace trifecta, Cauliflower breeding, Carp hybrids, C4 evolution, Organic food, Symbionts squared, Ozark agrobiodiversity, Using genebanks, Food security vulnerability
- Geopolitical Maize: Peasant Seeds, Everyday Practices, and Food Security in Mexico. Growing landraces in Mexico as a feminist act.
- Resource-Use Patterns in Swidden Farming Communities: Implications for the Resilience of Cassava Diversity. In this bit of Brazil, all farmers have some cassava varieties, other varieties are more private, which means that diversity is reasonably well maintained if farms are lost at random. Ah, but what about if women farmers are lost?
- Indigenous Knowledge on Landraces and Fonio-Based Food in Benin. 35 landraces, some of them even agronomically good. No word on whether those are the common or the private ones.
- A Review on Genetic Improvement of Cauliflower. There’s a tension between hybrids and breeding for organic conditions even in cauliflower.
- Growth Performance of Indian Major Carps and Their Hybrids in Polyculture in Bangladesh. Looks like hybrids are bad in carp, though.
- Deep Evolutionary Comparison of Gene Expression Identifies Parallel Recruitment of Trans-Factors in Two Independent Origins of C4 Photosynthesis. Plants which diverged 140 million years ago have in the meantime evolved the same trans-factors (“protein that binds to specific DNA sequences, thereby controlling the flow [or transcription] of genetic information from DNA to messenger RNA”) to come up with C4 photosynthesis. You know, this C4 rice thing just might be doable.
- Organic Diets Significantly Lower Children’s Dietary Exposure to Organophosphorus Pesticides. When “conventional” food was replaced by organically grown stuff, children had lower levels of nasties in the urine. No word on what it took to convince the kids to eat their veggies.
- Building the crops of tomorrow: advantages of symbiont-based approaches to improving abiotic stress tolerance. Why breed, when you can inoculate.
- A single evolutionary innovation drives the deep evolution of symbiotic N2-fixation in angiosperms. It all started long ago with a cryptic mutation, which was lost and gained multiple times, but some clades are unlikely to lose it when they have gained it.
- Seeds of Persistence: Agrobiodiversity in the American Mountain South. “…southern/central Appalachia is the most diverse foodshed at the varietal level in the United States, Canada, and northern Mexico studied to date.”
- Separating the wheat from the chaff – a strategy to utilize plant genetic resources from ex situ genebanks. Using fancy math to mine legacy phenotypic data can yield a couple extra alleles.
- Sustainability and Food & Nutrition Security: A Vulnerability Assessment Framework for the Mediterranean Region. Take each vulnerability (say to climate change, or price volatility) and break it down into exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity.
Brainfood: Old flax, Rice in Spain, Rice in Iran, Mozambican cowpea, Agrobiodiversity reserve, Old olives, Georgian livestock, Crowdsourcing fungi
- Harvesting wild flax in the Galilee, Israel and extracting fibers — bearing on Near Eastern plant domestication. The wild stuff was harvested before the Neolithic Revolution.
- Building resilience to water scarcity in southern Spain: a case study of rice farming in Doñana protected wetlands. Better to restore part of the rice fields to natural wetlands.
- Evaluation of rice dominance and its impact on crop diversity in north of Iran. Rice can’t catch a break in Iran either.
- Evaluation of four Mozambican cowpea landraces for drought tolerance. One of them is promising.
- Agro-Biodiversity Spatial Assessment and Genetic Reserve Delineation for the Pollino National Park (Italy). Somewhat gratuitous use of GIS, as far as I can see, but pretty maps.
- A comparative analysis of genetic variation in rootstocks and scions of old olive trees — a window into the history of olive cultivation practices and past genetic variation. Much more variation among rootstocks than scions.
- The diversity of local Georgian agricultural animals. I’d like to see a Megrelian horse one day, they sound cool.
- Crowdsourcing to create national repositories of microbial genetic resources: fungi as a model. Why just fungi, though?
Nibbles: Agave pollination, Sanjaya Rajaram, PGR policy history, Ex situ conifers, Botanic garden theft, Kyrgyz forests, Home nurseries, American chestnut, South Pacific action
- Tequila and bats. Two of my favourite things.
- Continuing the Mexican theme, we have a World Food Prize 2014 winner.
- I wonder what he thinks of the changes he’s seen during his illustrious career in the international system for PGR conservation and use.
- I bet there’s a few endangered conifers, and maybe some ex situ collections, in Mexico.
- I hope there weren’t any among the plants stolen from the RBG Edinburgh recently.
- But perhaps there were some fruits and nuts from Kyrgyzstan?
- Well, the way to go is home nurseries, clearly.
- Maybe even with the GM chestnut, why not?
- Meanwhile, in the South Pacific, CePaCT has been really busy.
Brainfood: Open sesame, Turkish buffalo, Crops & diets, Tuberous-rooted chervil, Pine breeding, Pigeonpea diversity, Sorghum adoption, Slumdog trees, Regenerating wild sunflower
- Sesame Crop: An Underexploited Oilseed Holds Tremendous Potential for Enhanced Food Value. Nice overview of diversity conservation and use. Lots of scope for improvement.
- Microsatellite based genetic diversity among the three water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) populations in Turkey. No great evidence of differentiation among populations into breeds, unlike in India, say.
- Crop diversification, dietary diversity and agricultural income: empirical evidence from eight developing countries. More crops grown, more dietary diversity.
- Temporal evolution of the genetic diversity of Chaerophyllum bulbosum: Consequences on the genetic resources management. French article on the lack of hydrographic structuring, or erosion, in the genetic diversity of largely forgotten apiaceous root vegetable in Germany.
- Merging applied gene conservation activities with advanced generation breeding initiatives: a case study of Pinus radiata D. Don. Because introduction of new diversity from native areas is difficult, foresters in non-native areas should better understand and use the diversity in existing provenance/progeny trials.
- Comparative Analysis of Genetic Diversity among Cultivated Pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan (L) Millsp.) and Its Wild Relatives (C. albicans and C. lineatus) Using Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and Inter Simple Sequence Repeat (ISSR Fingerprinting. 16 Indian accessions classified in 3 clusters, with the stress resistant material mostly together. More diversity in the wilds.
- The role of varietal attributes on adoption of improved seed varieties: the case of sorghum in Kenya. Not just about yield.
- Vegetation in Bangalore’s Slums: Boosting Livelihoods, Well-Being and Social Capital. What’s needed is trees with short stature, narrow trunks, medium canopy, high value. How many species like that can you think of?
- Comparison of fatty acid composition of oil from original and regenerated populations of wild Helianthus species. It’s not the same.