- China does a census of crop diversity for its genebank.
- Getting birds to help replant forests in early modern Japan.
- Swapping seeds in Bristol.
- The complementary roles of fortification and biofortification.
Nibbles: Wild coffee, Humble potato, Banana seeds video, Citizen Bean, Svalbard, Microlivestock, Transhumance, Exotic tea, BIPOC heirlooms
- The Food Programme does coffee wild relatives.
- Potatoes are not that bad nutritionally.
- Getting banana seeds.
- Want to do citizen science with beans?
- The latest from Svalbard.
- Bugs again?
- Counting sheep.
- Weird tea is the best tea. But any tea will do in a pinch.
- BIPOC communities saving heirloom seeds.
Brainfood: Aspen mapping, Biodiversity & ag, Mining forages, China forages, China groundnuts, Soil microbes, Agroecology messaging, Old wood, Ugandan sorghum, New wild sweetpotato, Tasty fruits
- Remote sensing of cytotype and its consequences for canopy damage in quaking aspen. You can tell diploid from triploid trees from space.
- Future global conflict risk hotspots between biodiversity conservation and food security: 10 countries and 7 Biodiversity Hotspots. Fancy maths tells us biodiversity and agriculture are most in conflict in DRC, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Togo, Zambia, Angola, Guinea, Nigeria, Laos, and Cambodia.
- Allele mining in diverse accessions of tropical grasses to improve forage quality and reduce environmental impact. A draft reference genome from a single species tells us about 7 potentially useful alleles among 104 clearly very well chosen accessions of Urochloa spp and Megathyrsus maximus.
- Research Status of Forage Seed Industry in China. I wonder how many of the above alleles can be found in the Chinese forage collection. Might be easier to eventually find out if the website supposedly serving up the national forage germplasm resource management system actually worked.
- Safe conservation and utilization of peanut germplasm resources in the Oil Crops Middle-term Genebank of China. We are even told about some individual interesting accessions, though not how to get hold of them.
- The impact of crop diversification, tillage and fertilization type on soil total microbial, fungal and bacterial abundance: A worldwide meta-analysis of agricultural sites. Meta-analysis tells us that use of organic fertilisers and reduced tillage are associated with more microbes, fungi and bacteria in the soil.
- Detecting the linkage between arable land use and poverty using machine learning methods at global perspective. Machines tells us that higher crop yields and more fertilisers are associated with lower poverty levels. Non-machines are shocked. No word on soil microbial abundance.
- The 10 Elements of Agroecology: enabling transitions towards sustainable agriculture and food systems through visual narratives. Well, these 10 are not only the elements of agroecology, so they could tell us about other messaging too.
- Regional Patterns of Late Medieval and Early Modern European Building Activity Revealed by Felling Dates. Tree rings in old buildings tells us more felling where and when grain prices were low and mining activity high. No machines involed.
- Genetic diversity analysis and characterization of Ugandan sorghum. A tropical genebank collection can tell us about temperate-adapted germplasm, if we know how to ask.
- Discovery and characterization of sweetpotato’s closest tetraploid relative. Meet Ipomoea aequatoriensis T. Wells & P. Muñoz sp. nov. from, well, Ecuador.
- Metabolomic selection for enhanced fruit flavor. Another machine tells us how to pick tasty tomatoes and blueberries from chemical profiles. No word on when it will be able to describe new species.
A juicy tomato story
Jeremy’s latest newsletter has a useful snippet on a paper on the history of the tomato in Europe. I’ll reproduce it below as a taster, but consider subscribing, as there’s lots of other interesting stuff too, on everything from pizza to chocolate.
Maybe you saw those beautiful illustrations of 16th century tomatoes that were doing the rounds a few days ago. They were prompted by a lovely paper from the Netherlands looking at the earliest tomatoes in Europe. The paper may be a bit heavy going, but the researchers published their own summary for the rest of us.
The paper sheds light on those first tomatoes to arrive, and in particular on the notion that these first fruits “were elongated, segmented, and gold in color. After all, that is how they were depicted, and they were called ‘pomo d’oro’: golden apple.” Herbarium specimens and old drawings, many of them newly digitised, revealed many different colours, shapes, and sizes, but not whether tomatoes originated in Peru or Mexico, the two leading candidates. The Dutch researchers sequenced the highly degraded DNA of their specimen and say that it was definitely not a wild plant, and shows strong similarities with three Mexican varieties and two from Peru.
The indigenous Andes population in Peru started domesticating a small wild cherry tomato. They brought this to Mexico, and there they developed the tomato with large fruit that we know today.
No herbarium specimen is ever likely to germinate, so to find out how these first tomatoes in Europe might have tasted the best bet, they suggest, is to go to Mexico and Peru. DNA analysis could probably indicate the closest known relatives for a taste test.
Now, will someone please examine critically the whole “tomatoes didn’t catch on because they were considered poisonous” thing, or is there already enough proof of that?
Nibbles: Aurochs, Horse domestication, Tanzanian seeds, Legume portal, MGIS, ISF, Mexico & Philippines
- A wild relative making a comeback in Europe.
- Can wild horses be far behind?
- An effort to bring back traditional foods in Tanzania.
- A new data portal on legumes.
- An old data portal gets an update.
- ISF resources on plant genetic resources.
- Mexican coconut and beverage resources are really Filipino resources.