- Agar plates, hydroponics, or field? The best way to do your phenotyping in one handy chart.
- Pioneering chilli expert Fabián García inducted into the National Agricultural Center’s Hall of Fame.
- Svalbard Global Seed Vault makes Top 10 of Project Management Institute’s best 50 projects, between M-Pesa and Netflix.
- Saving horse breeds in the USA.
- CIAT’s new genebank is in the works.
- Beer companies try to save their water supply. No word on what they plan to do about saving barley and hops diversity.
- World Bank maps biodiversity and the threats it faces. No plants, but still interesting. Opening the buggers is not easy, though.
- Wildland farming in the UK. A glimpse of the beckoning post-Brexit future.
Brainfood: Old seeds, Anthropocene, Apple polyphenols, Maize adaptation, Maize adoption, Biodiversity designs, Early millet, Asian populations, Japanese catalogue, Legacy data, PVP, Synthetic wheat double
- Unlocking the secrets of extreme seed longevity: the relevance of historic botanical collections to modern research. Claims that very old seeds are still alive are probably exaggerated. Except from genebanks, of course.
- Archaeological assessment reveals Earth’s early transformation through land use. We had transformed the world globally by 3000 years ago.
- Genome-wide association studies in apple reveal loci of large effect controlling apple polyphenols. It should be surprisingly easy to breed really healthy apples. No word on adaptation.
- Identifying loci with breeding potential across temperate and tropical adaptation via EigenGWAS and EnvGWAS. 13 genomic regions under ecological selection in maize. No word on nutrition.
- The maize frontier in rural South India: Exploring the everyday dynamics of the contemporary food regime. Adoption is being driven both top-down and bottom-up.
- Simple study designs in ecology produce inaccurate estimates of biodiversity responses. Complexity in experimental design is worth it.
- Early integration of pastoralism and millet cultivation in Bronze Age Eurasia. In southeastern Kazakhstan, ca 2700 BC, mobile pastoralists winter foddered their sheep and goat with the region’s earliest cultivated millet, which came from China.
- The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia. People and crops moved together, both east and west. Oh, and are the above the Yanmaya?
- Lost Grains and Forgotten Vegetables from Japan: the Seikei Zusetsu Agricultural Catalog (1793–1804). Fewer than half of the 109 species illustrated are still grown in Japan.
- Soil legacy data rescue via GlobalSoilMap and other international and national initiatives. Should do the same with genebank data too.
- Insights into deployment of DNA markers in plant variety protection and registration. Will increasingly be used in support of DUS, apparently.
- Genetic Contribution of Synthetic Hexaploid Wheat to CIMMYT’s Spring Bread Wheat Breeding Germplasm. 20% of the lines in international yield trials were synthetic-derived with an average genetic contribution from the D genome wild relative of 15.6%.
- Genetic diversity and population structure analysis of synthetic and bread wheat accessions in Western Siberia. The Japanese synthetics are something else.
Brainfood: Creole cattle, Wattle diversity, Olive death, Cucurbit diversity, Child nutrition, Seed systems, N efficiency, Black Sigatoka, Ag oils, Sharing double, Cow sharing, Horse phenotyping, Nutrients & CC
- The genetic ancestry of American Creole cattle inferred from uniparental and autosomal genetic markers. Out of Africa…
- Tracing the genetic origin of two Acacia mearnsii seed orchards in South Africa. For one of the orchards, the origin is unknown, but it’s distinct to all the other, known provenances.
- Genetic Characterization of Apulian Olive Germplasm as Potential Source in New Breeding Programs. Ok, but unclear what all this means for Xylella resistance, which presumably was the main reason for doing the work?
- Whole-genome resequencing of Cucurbita pepo morphotypes to discover genomic variants associated with morphology and horticulturally valuable traits. The two subspecies were domesticated and evolved independently.
- Mapping the effects of drought on child stunting. Lower precipitation is bad for kids.
- Governing Seeds in East Africa in the Face of Climate Change: Assessing Political and Social Outcomes. Wealthier, more food secure households are more likely to grow maize hybrids. Cause? Effect? But in any case the commercialization agenda has left sorghum behind.
- Exploiting genetic variation in nitrogen use efficiency for cereal crop improvement. Back to the genebank. Just one of a whole issue on genetic variation in physiological traits.
- Black Sigatoka in bananas: Ecoclimatic suitability and disease pressure assessments. The high yield areas are most at threat.
- Fats of the Land: New Histories of Agricultural Oils. Hidden histories are the best histories.
- Food Provisioning Services Via Homegardens and Communal Sharing in Satoyama Socio-ecological Production Landscapes on Japan’s Noto Peninsula. Sharing promotes diversity. Kinda beautiful.
- Cow Sharing and Alpine Ecosystems: A Comparative Case Study of Sharing Practices and Property Rights. The jury is out on whether it contributes to conservation, but it still seems pretty cool.
- Horse phenotyping based on video image analysis of jumping performance for conservation breeding. Judges don’t know what they’re talking about.
- Preserving the nutritional quality of crop plants under a changing climate: importance and strategies. Mainly due to eCO2. Need to breed for it under the new conditions. Or try other crops.
Brainfood: Mexican maize landraces, Mediterranean wheat landraces, Grassland richness, RTBs, Gender and agrobiodiversity, Kenya pastoralists, Production and child mortality, Historical evaluation data, Drought & rice, Barley diversity, Restoration, Sweetpotato shape, Panama disease phenotyping, Solanum keys
- Single-gene resolution of locally adaptive genetic variation in Mexican maize. Let the gene editing begin.
- From landraces to improved cultivars: Assessment of genetic diversity and population structure of Mediterranean wheat using SNP markers. Landraces cluster geographically, modern varieties by breeding programme.
- Global evidence of positive biodiversity effects on spatial ecosystem stability in natural grasslands. Higher species richness increases productivity in low-productivity communities, decreases it in high-productivity.
- Understanding the consequences of changes in the production frontiers for roots, tubers and bananas. Forget marketing, focus research on productivity.
- Gendered agrobiodiversity management and adaptation to climate change: differentiated strategies in two marginal rural areas of India. Women exercise more public control over agrobiodiversity in the Himalayas than in the Indo-Gangetic Plain.
- Historical Ecologies of Pastoralist Overgrazing in Kenya: Long-Term Perspectives on Cause and Effect. Let pastoralists move around.
- Mortality impact of low annual crop yields in a subsistence farming population of Burkina Faso under the current and a 1.5°C warmer climate in 2100. Low production in any given year responsible for considerable child mortality, which is likely to double because of climate change. If nothing is done.
- Historical phenotypic data from seven decades of seed regeneration in a wheat ex situ collection. Don’t throw any data away.
- Mapping drought-induced changes in rice area in India. 16% less rice area in a drought year compared to a normal year.
- Development of a Multi-parent Population for Genetic Mapping and Allele Discovery in Six-Row Barley. Asian material has flowering time variants found nowhere else.
- Ex situ collections and their potential for the restoration of extinct plants. There’s no excuse for not trying in situ.
- Assessing the remarkable morphological diversity and transcriptomic basis of leaf shape in Ipomoea batatas (sweetpotato). Mainly genetic, at least as currently measured.
- An Improved Phenotyping Protocol for Panama Disease in Banana. A single person can now inoculate 250 plants per hour.
- Dichotomous keys to the species of Solanum L. (Solanaceae) in continental Africa, Madagascar (incl. the Indian Ocean islands), Macaronesia and the Cape Verde Islands. Monumental.
Brainfood: Mineral history, Tomato nutrients, Tomato breeding, Phenotyping plants, Restoration genomics, Green Revolution, Banana B, SPAM2005, Ancient Chinese wheat, Late blight, Sorghum seed size, N & stability, African cannabis, Brazil wheat, Wild safflower
- Mineral nutrient composition of vegetables, fruits and grains: The context of reports of apparent historical declines. Apparent being the operative word. This is a couple of years old but always worth recycling. (There’s also this Politico piece from a couple of years back on the “nutrient collapse.”)
- Phenolic composition and antioxidant properties of ex-situ conserved tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) germplasm. But there’s always room for improvement.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) Germplasm Developed by Texas A&M Breeding Programs. Plenty of diversity out there for it.
- Crop productivity as related to single-plant traits at key phenological stages in durum wheat. On isolated plants, only specific leaf weight and spike partitioning at anthesis were correlated with population yield.
- The potential of genomics for restoring ecosystems and biodiversity. From improved seed sourcing to gene editing for funky genotypes.
- Was the Green Revolution intended to maximise food production? No, apparently it was to encourage a move to commercial production in specific areas.
- Musa balbisiana genome reveals subgenome evolution and functional divergence. The starch synthesis pathway is more active than in the A-subgenome. There’s probably more, but that’s all I could understand.
- Pixelating crop production: Consequences of methodological choices. Crop prices and market access had little effect on the robustness of the SPAM2005 spatial production allocation model.
- Phylogenetic and population structural inference from genomic ancestry maintained in present‐day common wheat Chinese landraces. 3000 old wheat not dissimilar to current landraces in W China.
- Stacking three late blight resistance genes from wild species directly into African highland potato varieties confers complete field resistance to local blight races. But it’s GM so it doesn’t count, right?
- Genomic signatures of seed mass adaptation to global precipitation gradients in sorghum. Drought stress led to bigger grains.
- Nitrogen addition reduced ecosystem stability regardless of its impacts on plant diversity. Stability depends on more than just diversity. In grasslands.
- A brief agricultural history of cannabis in Africa, from prehistory to canna-colony. Decolonise the weed.
- Genetic Gain Over 30 Years of Spring Wheat Breeding in Brazil. 1.3% per year. Is it enough? Can it be sustained?
- The Use of Wild Relatives of Safflower to Increase Genetic Diversity for Fatty Acid Composition and Drought Tolerance. So transgressive.