- Milk of ruminants in ceramic baby bottles from prehistoric child graves. Neolithic sippy cups. Cute.
- Heat and Drought Stress Advanced Global Wheat Harvest Timing from 1981–2014. 2.5 days per decade.
- A strong east–west Mediterranean divergence supports a new phylogeographic history of the carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua, Leguminosae) and multiple domestications from native populations. No evidence of an eastern refugium.
- Value chains to improve diets: Diagnostics to support intervention design in Malawi. You can modify existing social protection interventions to optimize diets (including increasing diet diversity) by enhancing public- and private-sector linkages.
- Contemporary evolution of maize landraces and their wild relatives influenced by gene flow with modern maize varieties. Landrace genetic diversity actually increased due to introgression from modern varieties.
- Ancient genomes reveal early Andean farmers selected common beans while preserving diversity. Because they applied weak selection. Can breeders learn from this? Also, is it similar for maize?
- Reconstruction of nine thousand years of agriculture-based diet and impact on human genetic diversity in Asia. Changes in diet through domestication and processing have left signatures on the human genome.
- Transgressive segregations for agronomic improvement using interspecific crosses between C. arietinum L. x C. reticulatum Ladiz. and C. arietinum L. x C. echinospermum Davis species. For things like pod number, earliness and tolerance to cold.
- Linking global crop and livestock consumption to local production hotspots. China is the largest consumer of primary crops, and the third largest consumer of livestock. The Corn Belt, cerrado, Europe and E. China feeds it, and the world.
- How conservation initiatives go to scale. With great difficulty.
- Morphometrics Reveals Complex and Heritable Apple Leaf Shapes. It’s mainly about aspect ratio.
- Nutrient and Antinutrient Composition of Winged Bean (Psophocarpus tetragonolobus (L.) DC.) Seeds and Tubers. The best, and worst, among 50 accessions. Spoiler alert: it depends on the nutrient, and on whether you prefer the seeds or tubers.
- Identification of Founding Accessions and Patterns of Relatedness and Inbreeding Derived from Historical Pedigree Data in a White Clover Germplasm Collection in New Zealand. 15,000 accessions trace to about 175 founders.
- Poverty not taste drives the consumption of protected species in Madagascar. Let them eat domestic livestock meat.
Nibbles: Diversification, Watermelon lecture, Global productivity gaps, Kenyan CWR, Indian rice diversity, Native American seeds, Cool newsletters
- Value chains for baskets of products to diversify production and consumption.
- Video lecture on watermelon domestication.
- “…global agricultural productivity needs to increase at an average annual rate of 1.73 percent to sustainably produce food, feed, fiber, and bioenergy for 10 billion people in 2050.
- Maybe crop wild relatives can help? Kenyan media thinks so. This is the project in question, though you wouldn’t know it from the article.
- Somewhat one-sided account of ex situ rice conservation in India. People are looking into some of the claims…
- The Native American Seeds Protection Act of 2019 explained. Fingers crossed.
- Latest newsletters: the European PGRFA network & Genesys.
Brainfood: Diversification, Wheat genomics, Historical tom, Crop mapping, African crops & CC, Trans CWR, Fish nutrition, Seed storage, Indian rice, Food Neighbourhoods, Diet sustainability, Onion evaluation, Aussie wild rice, Rice evaluation
- To diversify or not to diversify, that is the question. Pursuing agricultural development for smallholder farmers in marginal areas of Ghana. Diversify.
- Improving grain yield, stress resilience and quality of bread wheat using large-scale genomics. A genotype –> phenotype map at last. I guess that means breeders are superfluous.
- The earliest recorded tomato in Britain, in Wales. In 1590, no less.
- Biotechnology of the sweetpotato: ensuring global food and nutrition security in the face of climate change. A whole special issue. Our troubles are over.
- Probabilistic global maps of crop-specific areas from 1961 to 2014. A new, different, cooler algorithm provides somewhat different results to older, less cool algorithms.
- Potential adaptive strategies for 29 sub-Saharan crops under future climate change. Climatic conditions not currently experienced by these crops will spread, but CWRs and diversity from outside Africa might help.
- Trans Situ Conservation of Crop Wild Relatives. Just means properly integrated in and ex situ.
- Criar y Dejarse Criar: Trans-Situ Crop Conservation and Indigenous Landscape Management through a Network of Global Food Neighborhoods. See what it means? Scaling up the Parque de la Papa.
- Harnessing global fisheries to tackle micronutrient deficiencies. Small fish from the tropics could be really good for nutrition in some countries. Namibia, I’m looking at you.
- Artificial seed aging reveals the invisible fraction: Implications for evolution experiments using the resurrection approach. Store your seeds properly.
- Status of Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Genepool Collected from Western Ghats Region of India: Gap Analysis and Diversity Distribution Mapping using GIS Tools. Out of 678 rice landraces from this region, 43 have been used in crop improvement.
- Advancing an Integrative Framework to Evaluate Sustainability in National Dietary Guidelines. In 32 sub-dimensions, no less. Important.
- Assembly and characterisation of a unique onion diversity set identifies resistance to Fusarium basal rot and improved seedling vigour. Group according to local daylength.
- Australian wild rice populations: a key resource for global food security. Because they’ve been isolated from the crop.
- Novel method for evaluation of anaerobic germination in rice and its application to diverse genetic collections. No word on whether it’s applicable to Aussie wild species, but I bet it is.
Nibbles: Forages, Zimbabwe policy, Kyrgyz nuts, Warwick vegetables, Asparagus breeder
- Brachiaria is the new Napier grass.
- Zimbabwe has a new seed conservation strategy.
- Agroforestry in Kyrgyzstan.
- Podcast on the Warwick University veggies genebank.
- Award for asparagus breeding. Somebody has to do it…
Nibbles: Phenotyping, Capsicum expert, Svalbard kudos, Yippee-ki-yay, Future Seeds, Bottoms up, Maps galore, Knepp Wildland Project
- 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.