- Final Human Universe episode features Svalbard Global seed Vault.
- GRAIN objects to where Gates Foundation spends its money. Nobody much cares.
- Latest on that UC Davis strawberry breeding programme debacle.
- Yes, bears do shit (apple seeds) in the woods. And some context.
- A conference for the hippy in all of us.
- The dark side of pasture breeding. Super-weed, I am your father!
- World Parks Congress on soon too.
- No access to healthy food? Use your mobile! Watch a video! Grow traditional crops!
- Toyota funds the Millennium Seed Bank.
- ESA supports the ITPGRFA. Speak Up For Seed!
Brainfood: Enset & cattle, Evolution Canyon, Indian spices, Bohemian fruit rhapsody, ILRI forage genebank, Wild sunflower, Agroecology, Holistic hazelnuts, Culture & conservation, Salty broomcorn, Fancy mapping, German cherries, Ethiopian barley nutrients
- Sidama Agro-Pastoralism and Ethnobiological Classification of its Primary Plant, Enset (Ensete ventricosum). The Sidama feed the high-protein parts of enset to cattle and then get their protein from milk. Seems a roundabout way of going about things but I guess they know best.
- Evolution of wild barley at “Evolution Canyon”: adaptation, speciation, pre-agricultural collection, and barley improvement. One-stop shop for researching evolution of a crop wild relative.
- Spices and Condiments: Status of Genetic Resources and Setting Priorities for Introduction in India. National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources is on the job, collecting at home and acquiring from genebanks abroad.
- Inventory and conservation of fruit tree landraces as cultural heritage of Bohemian Forest (Czech Republic), indicators for former settlements of ethnic minorities. That would mean Germans. No word on whether the database has been cross-checked with that of BLE-IBV. Interested in the topic of European landraces in general? Try this from Bioversity.
- Forage Diversity: An Essential Resource to Support Forage Development. ILRI’s genebank deconstructed.
- Wild Sunflower Species as a Genetic Resource for Resistance to Sunflower Broomrape (Orobanche cumana Wallr.). Pretty much all the perennial species have resistance, and many of the annuals. Thank goodness for the USDA collection, eh?
- Agroecological Research: Conforming — or Transforming the Dominant Agro-Food Regime? Bit of both? Is that such a bad thing?
- A multidisciplinary approach to enhance the conservation and use of hazelnut Corylus avellana L. genetic resources. Holistic, even.
- The Cooked is the Kept: Factors Shaping the Maintenance of Agro-biodiversity in the Andes. Keep your culture, keep your crop diversity.
- Response of broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) genotypes from semi arid regions of China to salt stress. 39 out of a core collection of 195. Result!
- Vital Signs: Integrating Data To Visualize the Human, Agriculture, and Nature Nexus. Sounds promising enough an effort to bring together livelihoods, production and environmental data, but when you go to the website (for Tanzania in this case), all you get is a bunch of admittedly very pretty pdf maps.
- Phenotypic and genotypic characterization in the collection of sour and duke cherries (Prunus cerasus and ×P. ×gondouini) of the Fruit Genebank in Dresden-Pillnitz, Germany. …give different results. If I had a dollar…
- Genome-wide association mapping of zinc and iron concentration in barley landraces from Ethiopia and Eritrea. There are QTLs. Now what?
Nibbles: Biological collections, ICT & food security, Pisco battles, Rabbit stew, Afghan silk, ILRI @40, Silicon Valley & livestock, Trade & deforestation, Nexus shmexus, Landscape analyzed, Native potatoes, Botanical herb garden, Plant crime, Cornbread & other indigenous foods, Climate smart ag, Caterpillar fungus, Reindeer poop virus, Rice breeder vid
- Biological collections under pressure.
- And mobile phones probably wont help. Much.
- Chilean pisco? Really?
- The end of cooking?
- Sericulture on the Silk Road.
- ILRI is 40, did we say? Not sure what they do on sericulture. No doubt somebody there will tell us. They’re social networking machines over there.
- Watch out, ILRI, Silicon Valley is coming for ya.
- One of the reasons why we need livestock research: deforestation.
- I like any article with the word nexus in the title.
- The landscape approach meta-analyzed to within an inch of its life. Bottom line: it’s the women, stupid!
- The power of the people’s potatoes.
- A secret herb garden revealed. I hope they install CCTV.
- Kana’tarokhónwe. Yep, clickbait, but worth it, trust me. And then scale the thing up.
- How to do climate-smart agriculture in Latin America and the Caribbean, country by country.
- Oh no, yet another article on that Himalayan Viagra caterpillar fungus thingy.
- Boffins resurrect 700-year-old fungus from reindeer crap.
- Indian rice breeders talk about their cool new basmati.
Apple pie
It must be the season, but there’s been a ton of stuff on apples on the interwebs recently. Here’s a little sampler:
- Problems with Kazakhstan’s apples.
- Problems with Britain’s apples.
- Cambridge has a solution for those, though.
- Solutions, actually.
- And then there’s Dan Bussey‘s way.
- And Rowan Jacobsen‘s. (He of the Apple Renaissance.) Which basically means documenting every last variety you can find.
- They can then all — or the ones you can still find — go into the Seed Savers Exchange collection, say.
- I’ll drink to that!
- And a teaser…
Brainfood: Filipino rice synonyms, Jatropha breeding, Polish oats, Amazonian peppers, Wild lentils, Indian pigeonpea, Russian peas, Pulse markers, Wild pollinators, Phenotyping platforms, Almonds & peaches, Cerrado roads, Arboreta conservation
- Multiplex SSR-PCR analysis of genetic diversity and redundancy in the Philippine rice (Oryza sativa L.) germplasm collection. 427 rice accessions in the national collection with similar names resolve to about 30 unique profiles. I think. The abstract is a little hard to follow, and that’s all I have access to.
- Quantitative genetic parameters of agronomic and quality traits in a global germplasm collection reveal excellent breeding perspectives for Jatropha curcas L. 375 genotypes, 7 locations and 3 years get you quite enough data to plan a decent breeding programme.
- Studies on genetic variation within old Polish cultivars of common oat. Forward into the past.
- Morphoagronomic peppers no gender pungent Capsicum spp. Amazonia. Actually nothing to do with gender. That’s a mis-translation of “genus,” if you can believe it. Paper basically says that Amazonian peppers are really variable, which is not as interesting as it might have been.
- Global Wild Annual Lens Collection: A Potential Resource for Lentil Genetic Base Broadening and Yield Enhancement. The core collection of wild annuals (which is actually a somewhat novel concept) comes mainly from Turkey and Syria, and it’s got diversity that’s not in the cultigen.
- Pigeon pea Genetic Resources and Its Utilization in India, Current Status and Future Prospects. Indian genebank evaluates the ICRISAT core and mini-core. Then does some mutation breeding :)
- Molecular genetic diversity of the pea (Pisum sativum L.) from the Vavilov Research Institute collection detected by the AFLP analysis. Molecular data does not correspond with subspecies nor ecogeographic groupings. Back to the drawing board.
- Characterization of microsatellite markers, their transferability to orphan legumes and use in determination of genetic diversity among chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) cultivars. Chickpea SSRs are ok for other, less studied, crops too.
- From research to action: enhancing crop yield through wild pollinators. Go wild.
- Integration of phenotyping and genetic platforms for a better understanding of wheat performance under drought. You really need managed environment facilities. Didn’t a paper in Brainfood last week say what you needed was a network of field sites? I guess you need both.
- Wild almonds gone wild: revisiting Darwin’s statement on the origin of peaches. He was not entirely wrong.
- The role of roadsides in conserving Cerrado plant diversity. 70% of species is not bad, I guess. No word on whether that includes wild peanuts, but I suspect yes.
- Do living ex situ collections capture the genetic variation of wild populations? A molecular analysis of two relict tree species, Zelkova abelica and Zelkova carpinifolia. Yes and no. But this is in botanic gardens and arboreta, what about seedbanks? The cerrado people want to know…