- Farm-Africa celebrates its new cassava successes … but are they resistant to Brown Streak disease?
- Meanwhile, Glenn maps the possible extent of the looming CBSD problem.
- Rothamsted has a new Science Strategy. And it includes breeding for better nutrition.
- Can insect biodiversity help potato farmers in a warming climate? It’s complicated …
- Philippine banana industry wants government money to protect its production.
How will we sustain a more populated planet?
Worth a thousand words.
AfricaRice’s African rice collection
Nice video. Note the reference, towards the end, to the systematic characterization of AfricaRice‘s collection of 2,500 Oryza glaberrima accessions. Interestingly, Genesys says the Centre has 3,796 accessions. I wonder what’s happened to the rest. Here’s a map of the 863 accessions from 129 sites with georeferences.
LATER: Compare with the map of African rice cultivation in Diana Buja’s post.
Brainfood: Football nutrition, Sorghum markers, Alpine herb, Gap analysis, Evolutionary breeding, Aphids, Birds and farmland, Cameroon forests
- Nutrition and culture in professional football: A mixed method approach. Footballers need a more diverse diet. Well, kinda. I just wanted to get this paper in here because wouldn’t it be cool if we could get Lionel Messi to talk about agrobiodiversity-rich diets?
- Diversity analysis using ISSR markers for resistance to shoot pests in sorghum. There may be a diversity of resistance mechanisms.
- Domestication of Alpine blue-sow-thistle (Cicerbita alpina (L.) Wallr.): six year trial results. I know. Why would you want to, right? Takes all sorts to make a diverse diet, I guess. Maybe we can get Lionel Messi to eat it?
- Improving representativeness of genebank collections through species distribution models, gap analysis and ecogeographical maps. Fancy GIS-based prioritization results in more, better germplasm collecting. Nice to have the data.
- Evolutionary Plant Breeding in Cereals—Into a New Era. Martin Wolfe and colleagues lay it on the line; why it is a good idea, and what the obstacles are.
- Genetic interactions influence host preference and performance in a plant-insect system. Aphids and barleys have genetic preferences for one another.
- Pasture area and landscape heterogeneity are key determinants of bird diversity in intensively managed farmland. As in the northern hemisphere, so too in Argentina.
- Tree diversity and conservation value of Ngovayang’s lowland forests, Cameroon. Both high, and I’m betting some economically important trees are among them.
Brainfood: Ectomycorrhiza, Synthetic peanuts, Ancient Greek amphorae, European bison, Pea breeding, Animal domestication
- Ectomycorrhizas and climate change. One more damn thing to worry about.
- Meiotic analysis of the hybrids between cultivated and synthetic tetraploid groundnuts. It’s normal. The meiosis I mean. Why isn’t this sort of thing done with more crops?
- Aspects of Ancient Greek trade re-evaluated with amphora DNA evidence. More than just wine and olive oil.
- Reconstructing range dynamics and range fragmentation of European bison for the last 8000 years. More eastern and northern than thought, and more affected by the spread of farming than climate change in the Holocene.
- Resistance to downy mildew (Peronospora viciae) in Australian field pea germplasm (Pisum sativum). It comes from Afghanistan.
- Deciphering the genetic basis of animal domestication. Despite all that selection and all those bottlenecks, they really are diverse.
Don’t forget the open Mendeley group for the papers we link to here.