- Unlocking the genetic diversity of the undomesticated rice relative Oryza longistaminata. Natural hybrids discovered in IRRI genebank can accelerate breeding.
- Evidence for mid-Holocene rice domestication in the Americas. Another rice domestication?
- Evaluation and strategies of tolerance to water stress in Paspalum germplasm. A species for every purpose.
- Evaluation of Cassava Germplasm Accessions for High Tuber Yield and Starch Content for Industrial Exploitations. Watch Me681 take over. At least in India.
- Does intercropping enhance yield stability in arable crop production? A meta-analysis. Yes.
- Collection, Evaluation and Utilization of Cotton Germplasm. Over a thousand accessions!
- Treasure in the vault: The guardianship of ‘heritage’ seeds, fruit and vegetables. “Treasure” is a loaded term.
- Will the same ex situ protocols give similar results for closely related species? Yep.
- Global Hotspots of Conflict Risk between Food Security and Biodiversity Conservation. Madagascar is particularly worrying.
- Genetic diversity assessment of a set of introduced mung bean accessions (Vigna radiata L.). Germplasm from USDA genebank could be useful in China.
- Database of European chestnut cultivars and definition of a core collection using simple sequence repeats. Not sure you can call it European when 96 of 118 accessions are from Spain, but anyway.
- Genome of wild olive and the evolution of oil biosynthesis. Two genes explain all that oil…
- Did Greek colonisation bring olive growing to the north? An integrated archaeobotanical investigation of the spread of Olea europaea in Greece from the 7th to the 1st millennium BC. …which would have been intensely interesting to early Bronze Age elites.
- The draft genome of tropical fruit durian (Durio zibethinus). “Transcriptomic analysis showed upregulation of sulfur-, ethylene-, and lipid-related pathways in durian fruits.” You don’t say. Let’s engineer them into olives. Paleopolyploidizations here too, as in olives.
Another Committee on World Food Security report
I knew I’d forget one:
- HLPE. 2017. Sustainable forestry for food security and nutrition. A report by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security, Rome.
The webcast is live now.
Also, since I’m at it, here’s a useful blog post on the other CFS report, the one on “Nutrition and Food Systems,” from one of the authors, summarizing eight ways why the report is different. This is what resonated with me most:
Third, it is, subversively, a bit radical. Statements such as “The risks of making well intentioned but inappropriate policy choices are much smaller than the risks of using a lack of evidence as an argument for inaction” are fairly heretical for many nutrition investors guided by Lancet 2008 and 2013. For the more market based interventions within the food system the hard evidence is usually not present and one has to trust educated best guesses and calculated risks as a guide to action.
Sometimes, you just have to do it.
Brainfood: Hot seeds, Diet diversity double, Finger millet GxE, Botanical gardens, CWR prebreeding double, Pathogen spread, Dog genomics, Cryo calculations, Biodiversity & productivity double, Movies & conservation
- High-temperature stress during drying improves subsequent rice (Oryza sativa L.) seed longevity. Up to 45°C, because it triggers a stress protection mechanism.
- Agricultural diversification and dietary diversity: A feminist political ecology of the everyday experiences of landless and smallholder households in northern Ghana. Production diversity at the farm level is necessary for dietary diversity, but not sufficient.
- Critical review of the emerging research evidence on agricultural biodiversity, diet diversity, and nutritional status in low- and middle-income countries. Production diversity at the farm level has a small but consistent positive association with dietary diversity.
- Exploiting Genetic Diversity for Adaptation and Mitigation of Climate Change: A Case of Finger Millet in East Africa. Some varieties are good everywhere, others only good in some places.
- Ex situ conservation of plant diversity in the world’s botanic gardens. A third of all known plants, and half of endangered ones, are to be found in botanic gardens, but the tropics are under-represented.
- Prebreeding Using Wild Species for Genetic Enhancement of Grain Legumes at ICRISAT. It’s a drag, but someone has to do it.
- Wide crosses of durum wheat (Triticum durum Desf.) reveal good disease resistance, yield stability, and industrial quality across Mediterranean sites. Not such a drag after all.
- Quantifying airborne dispersal routes of pathogens over continents to safeguard global wheat supply. Incredibly fancy maths says Yemen is the key.
- Demographic history, selection and functional diversity of the canine genome. There’s a lot here, in particular the genes that were involved in early phenotypic differentiation from wolves, and evidence of continuous geneflow with wilds canids. But the thing that really got me is that humans and dogs show parallel evolution in the ability to process complex carbohydrates, associated with agriculture.
- Probabilistic viability calculations for cryopreserving vegetatively propagated collections in genebanks. One Excel spreadsheet to rule all cryo.
- Biodiversity effects in the wild are common and as strong as key drivers of productivity. Meta-analysis of observations in nature supports results of experimental work.
- Biodiversity promotes primary productivity and growing season lengthening at the landscape scale. “…a large species pool is important for adaption to climate change.” An example of the above.
- Considering connections between Hollywood and biodiversity conservation. Conservationists need to get out more.
Agricultural biodiversity wades into the mainstream at long last
I really haven’t done sufficient justice to the new book from Bioversity, Mainstreaming Agrobiodiversity in Sustainable Food Systems: Scientific Foundations for an Agrobiodiversity Index, whose moving dedication I reproduce above. It’s a great review of the diverse reasons why agricultural diversity is important to us. But also of the complexities involved in translating diversity in farmers’ fields, let alone in genebanks, into development outcomes like better nutrition, as clearly shown by the diagram below.
Nibbles: Agrobiodiversity Index, PPB, Heirloom rice, CATIE genebank, Faberge potato, Val @CePaCT, Nigerian food, Ethnobotanical book, Hope Jahren quote
- Bioversity DG lobbies for the Agrobiodiversity Index.
- One of her staff lobbies for participatory plant breeding. And he’s not the only one.
- Maybe they could tackle Indian rice next?
- Protecting cacao at CATIE.
- Faberge had a potato, of all things, and it’s a beaut.
- Celebrating Valerie Tuia, until recently genebank manager at SPC. Faberge taro, anyone?
- The Nigeria food database includes taro, but only leaves.
- The Digital atlas of traditional agricultural practices and food processing weighs 10kg, but seems a stone-cold Faberge-level masterpiece. Not sure if it has much on taro, though.
- “Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.”