- Nomadic ecology shaped the highland geography of Asia’s Silk Roads. Goat Roads doesn’t have the same ring to it.
- Agro-biodiversity has increased over a 95 year period at sub-regional and regional scales in southern Quebec, Canada. It’s all in the definition.
- Trees for life: The ecosystem service contribution of trees to food production and livelihoods in the tropics. Meta-analysis shows trees and forests are good for crop yields and livelihoods.
- Discovery and characterization of two new stem rust resistance genes in Aegilops sharonensis. Chipping away at Ug99.
- A study of allelic diversity underlying flowering-time adaptation in maize landraces. That’s a lot of genes.
- The challenges faced by living stock collections in the USA. Money, mainly.
- Low Genetic Differentiation and Evidence of Gene Flow among Barley Landrace Populations in Tunisia. One big happy family.
- Rethinking the approach to viability monitoring in seed genebanks. From germination tests to automated seed storage experiments.
- Evolution of Rosaceae Fruit Types Based on Nuclear Phylogeny in the Context of Geological Times and Genome Duplication. A story of whole genome duplications.
- Reconstructing the genome of the most recent common ancestor of flowering plants. The mother of all crop wild relatives, before all those duplications, has 23,000 genes and is 214 million years old.
- What Drives Deforestation and What Stops It? A Meta-Analysis. Money, and money, respectively.
Nibbles: Give a man a chicken, Pollinator selection, Bananapocalypse redux, Red kiwi, ICARDA genebank, Dark comms, Food design, Traditional diets, Revitalizing villages, Peruvian diversity, Moving botany
- Which should come first, the chicken or the cash? MIL unavailable for comment.
- Pollinators are mini plant breeders.
- Save the Cavendish! No, wait…
- There’s a red kiwi coming. Eventually. No, not left-wing New Zealanders.
- ICARDA decentralizes its genebank. But we knew that.
- GFAR webinars on communicating research.
- Designing food. What could possibly go wrong?
- Decolonize it instead.
- Ecotourism in Portugal. No word on whether decolonized food involved.
- Kickstarter on documenting food crops in Peru, decolonized or not.
- Tracing the colonization and (hopefully) decolonization of economic botany products. Fascinating idea.
Nibbles: Amazon conservation, Radiation breeding, Chocomuseum, Biodiversity survey, Robot phenotyping, C4F, Sheepish
- The latest on the Pristine Myth of the Amazon. And how to protect it.
- Rice going nuclear in Bangladesh.
- NYC gets a chocolate museum.
- What is biodiversity? Answers on a postcard, please…
- Maybe robots can help with that.
- Crops for the Future gets the Virginia Gewin treatment.
- Sheep domestication in half a page.
Brainfood: ABS data, Spanish chestnuts, Norwegian CWR, Bambara genome, AnGR, Jakar sheep decline, Ashanti pig, Bactris biopiracy, Avocado core, Brassicacea phylogeny
- Access and Benefit Sharing under the Convention on Biological Diversity and Its Protocol: What Can Some Numbers Tell Us about the Effectiveness of the Regulatory Regime? That not much has happened. Between 1996 and 2015, out of the 14 countries with ABS legislation in force, 2 agreements for commercial researches per year.
- Genetic monitoring of traditional chestnut orchards reveals a complex genetic structure. The diversity in Spain is in the rootstocks.
- Climate change and national crop wild relative conservation planning. Well, for Norway anyway.
- Integrating genetic maps in bambara groundnut [Vigna subterranea (L) Verdc.] and their syntenic relationships among closely related legumes. Synteny to the rescue.
- Stakeholder involvement and the management of animal genetic resources across the world. Breeders’ associations and cooperatives are the key.
- Decline of Jakar sheep population in pastoral communities of Bhutan: A consequence of diminishing utility, alternate income opportunities and increasing challenges. It’s the fault of the caterpillar fungus.
- Origin and phylogenetic status of the local Ashanti Dwarf pig (ADP) of Ghana based on genetic analysis. It’s a bit of a mongrel.
- Genetic analysis identifies the region of origin of smuggled peach palm seeds. Genebank confirms biopiracy.
- Genetic Structure and Selection of a Core Collection for Long Term Conservation of Avocado in Mexico. 36 of 318 accessions recover 80% of total alleles, which seems a bit low.
- Genome sequencing supports a multi-vertex model for Brassiceae species. More than just “triangle of U”.
Brainfood: Arabidopsis refugia, Potato diversity, Palm uses, Coffee phylogeny, Traditional harvesting, Buckwheat trends, Maize double haploids, African cattle, Endophenotype
- On the post-glacial spread of human commensal Arabidopsis thaliana. A bit like Neanderthals.
- Exploration of the genetic diversity of cultivated potato and its wild progenitors (Solanum sect. Petota) with insights into potato domestication and genome evolution. Elite cultivars are a pretty diverse lot.
- Fundamental species traits explain provisioning services of tropical American palms. Bigger, more widespread species are more important to local people. Which means some useful things may be being missed.
- Genotyping-by-sequencing provides the first well-resolved phylogeny for coffee (Coffea) and insights into the evolution of caffeine content in its species: GBS coffee phylogeny and the evolution of caffeine content. Origin of the genus could be Africa. Or Asia. Or the Arabian Peninsula. So that narrows it down.
- A quiet harvest: linkage between ritual, seed selection and the historical use of the finger-bladed knife as a traditional plant breeding tool in Ifugao, Philippines. People kept old harvesting technology because it helped them show due reverence to the rice plant, and select seeds.
- Old Crop, New Society: Persistence and Change of Tartary Buckwheat Farming in Yunnan, China. It’s going down, but won’t disappear. No word on what’s happening to diversity though.
- Tapping the genetic diversity of landraces in allogamous crops with doubled haploid lines: a case study from European flint maize. The things people have to do to make use of landraces.
- Conservation of indigenous cattle genetic resources in Southern Africa’s smallholder areas: turning threats into opportunities — A review. We now the breeds, but not all their characteristics, and how to get the most out of them.
- The Importance of Endophenotypes to Evaluate the Relationship between Genotype and External Phenotype. Oh for pity’s sake, something else to worry about.