Nibbles: Fancy fungus, Fancy CWR book, Fancy dataset, Fancy food, Fancy wheat collection, Fancy diet, Fancy seeds, Fancy agriculture

  1. Symbiotic fungus can help plants and detoxify methylmercury.
  2. Very attractive book on the wild tomatoes of Peru. I wonder if any of them eat heavy metals.
  3. There’s a new dataset on the world’s terrestrial ecosystems. I’d like to know which one has the most crop wild relative species per unit area. Has anyone done that calculation? They must have.
  4. Iran sets up a saffron genebank. Could have sworn they already had one.
  5. The Natural History Museum digs up some old wheat samples, the BBC goes a bit crazy with it.
  6. Paleolithic diets included plants. Maybe not wheat or saffron though.
  7. Community seedbanks are all the rage in Odisha.
  8. Seeds bring UK and South Africa closer together. Seeds in seedbanks. Not community seedbanks, perhaps, but one can hope.
  9. Can any of the above make agriculture any more nutrition-sensitive? I’d like to think yes. Maybe except for the mercury-eating fungus, though you never know…

Pulse evaluation set to INCREASE

As we’ve noted a couple of times here, the INCREASE project (Intelligent Collections of Food Legumes Genetic Resources for European Agrofood Systems) includes a fantastic citizen science component. If you’re interested in taking part, registration for the third phase opens in a few days.

Nibbles: Indian millets, Coconut breeding, Bhutan seed systems, Bangladesh gardens, Innovea coffee breeding network, Israel and NZ genebanks

  1. India decides to export millets. How about conserving them?
  2. India releases a new coconut. How about new millets?
  3. Bhutan BOLDly studies its seed systems. Maybe even including some millets.
  4. Bangladesh revives floating gardens. No millets.
  5. Coffee gets an international breeding network. Do millets have one?
  6. Israel‘s and New Zealand‘s genebanks make the news. How about millet genebanks?

Brainfood: Coconut in vitro, Clean cryo, Chickpea & lentil collections, Genebank data history, Eurisco update, Mining genebank data, TIK, Sampling strategy, Drones, GIS, Mexican CWR, Post-2020 biodiversity framework