Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

• 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.