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April 18, 2018April 19, 2018

A Nibble big enough to choke on

Yeah, yeah, it’s been quiet here for the best part of a month. Work, you know. When you notice lack of action here, though, that doesn’t mean that I’m being completely idle. Not always, anyway. Check on Twitter and Facebook, if you dare, and you’ll see new stuff on a fairly regular basis, because that’s easier to do than a fully-fledged blog post. Anyway, what I’ll do here is a mega-Nibble hoovering up snippets from the past few weeks that I posted on social media but not here.

Vegetable History 101.
If you have a heirloom of one of the above to name, try this neural network approach.
Just as long as the name doesn’t end up being racist.
It’s too late for some German veggies. Though not, it seems, for German forests. What’s the difference?
Not yet too late for Tanzanian wild veggies, but winter is coming. Maybe giving them cool names would help.
And for some North American indigenous crops too, thanks to some committed people.
And for beans in Mexico for that matter.
Why all the above is important.
And urgent.
And this is the resulting problem if you ignore that lesson.
You see, the Australians are on the case, with their bush tucker fixation.
Mind you, it’s not all sweetness and light: the quinoa bubble bursts.
Maybe we can make a game of this diversification lark. Oh, look, it seems we can.
You can even breed for it.
Wherein I pontificate about genebank data. Again.
Maybe these guys will listen?
These guys obviously did, and built a better peanut.
Yeah, but can you see them from space?
The cost of ending hunger. The cost of ensuring crop diversity conservation in genebanks seems, well, peanuts.
The archaeology of gardens. Two of my favourite topics, combined. If only there was beer too. And peanuts.
A banana is a banana is a banana. Not.
All those bananas? You can help to map them.
They’ll put them on Google Earth next, like Kew did for these beautiful natural areas, with all their crop wild relatives :)
A Japanese agricultural encyclopaedia. Illustrated to boot.
Or, for the more Euro-centric, food art at the Met…
This cheese should probably be at the Met there too.
And this weed strain may well soon be on sale in the gift shop.
The sweet potato made it to Oceania on its own.
Oh no it didn’t.
On the other hand, livestock generally need to be accompanied.
All the yeast belong China.

March 26, 2018March 26, 2018

Brainfood: Mesoamerican fruits, PES, Chinese vegetables, Controlled pollination, Pastoralist fodder, Taxonomy, African nightshades, Ag origins, Divortification

Human diets drive range expansion of megafauna-dispersed fruit species. Megafauna dropped the ball (or the fruit), humans picked it up and ran with it.
Experimental evidence on payments for forest commons conservation. Maybe we should have paid the megafauna.
Vegetable genetic resources in China. 3 genebanks, 36,000 accessions, 120 species, about 1000 distributions per year (to research units).
A cost-effective ground pollination system for hybridization in tall coconut palms. I have seen the future of coconut pollination.
Determinants of pastoral and agro-pastoral households’ participation in fodder production in Makueni and Kajiado Counties, Kenya. Household heads who are female, have access to extension services, or are members of social groups are more likely to go in for fodder production.
Taxonomy based on science is necessary for global conservation. Incredible to me that needs to be said.
Development of next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based SSRs in African nightshades: Tools for analyzing genetic diversity for conservation and breeding. Solanum scabrum and S. villosum separate nicely, and show much diversity.
A natural adaptive syndrome as a model for the origins of cereal agriculture. Large seed, awns and monodominance.
Development and Examination of Sweet Potato Flour Fortified with Indigenous Underutilized Seasonal Vegetables. Ticks all the boxes, lets call it divortification.

March 19, 2018March 24, 2018

Brainfood: Tunisian carrots, Benin & CC, Tree variation, Grape phenotyping, Small ruminant domestication, Rio herbarium, Barley domestication, Millet groupings, Greek cheese

Genotyping-by-sequencing reveals the origin of the Tunisian relatives of cultivated carrot (Daucus carota). D. carota subsp. gummifer is different.
Impacts of climate change on cropping patterns in a tropical, sub-humid watershed. Recent advances in both rainfed and irrigated cropping in central Benin will be undone. Genetics to the rescue?
Is local trait variation related to total range size of tropical trees? No.
High-Precision Phenotyping of Grape Bunch Architecture Using Fast 3D Sensor and Automation. Next, put it on a drone.
Convergent genomic signatures of domestication in sheep and goats. Same genes, different selection pressures.
Herbarium collection of the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden (RB), Brazil. Any crops wild relatives? Pretty sure there must be.
Targeted resequencing reveals genomic signatures of barley domestication. Distinct ancestor populations at eastern and western ends of the Fertile Crescent implicated in domestication.
Towards Defining Heterotic Gene Pools in Pearl Millet [Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R.Br.]. Hybrid pearl millet is just around the corner.
Biodiversity and microbial resistance of lactobacilli isolated from the traditional Greek cheese kopanisti. Impressive biodiversity, alarming resistance.

March 14, 2018March 14, 2018

Lost rice found, again

First there was Carolina Gold. Now there is “upland red bearded” or “Moruga Hill” rice.

Mr. Dennis had heard about hill rice…through the culinary organization Slow Food USA and the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, the group that brought back Carolina Gold in the early 2000s. He’d also heard stories about it from elderly cooks in his community. Like everyone else, he thought the hill rice of the African diaspora was lost forever.

But then, on a rainy morning in the Trinidad hills in December 2016, he walked past coconut trees and towering okra plants to the edge of a field with ripe stalks of rice, each grain covered in a reddish husk and sprouting spiky tufts.

“Here I am looking at this rice and I said: ‘Wow. Wait a minute. This is that rice that’s missing,’” he said.

It is hard to overstate how shocked the people who study rice were to learn that the long-lost American hill rice was alive and growing in the Caribbean. Horticulturists at the Smithsonian Institution want to grow it, rice geneticists at New York University are testing it and the United States Department of Agriculture is reviewing it. If all goes well, it may become a commercial crop in America, and a menu staple as diners develop a deeper appreciation for African-American food.

And no, they couldn’t have found it in genebanks. ¹ This is what Genesys knows from the region. Trinidad is shown by the yellow marker, rice accessions in red. No rice accessions in Genesys from anywhere near Trinidad, alas.

Someone should really have a systematic look at all those red dots, though.

March 13, 2018April 9, 2018

Crowdsourcing genebank training needs

USDA-ARS and Colorado State University are organizing a workshop:

To identify the pedagogical options, logistics, and curriculum topics for a U.S. plant genetic resource management training effort, with major emphasis on a distance-learning course.

To design a strategy to develop, deliver, and sustain a plant genetic resource management training program.

They’re asking me for an “international perspective” on what genebank managers should be knowledgeable about, so I’m asking you. But don’t send me a laundry list (there are plenty of curriculums out there), or your favourite topic. What I’d like to know is what ONE topic you think has been neglected in teaching crop diversity conservation in the past, and is unlikely to be revived without a major effort.

All contributions will be gratefully acknowledged in my presentation, needless to say (and I’ll post evidence to that effect in due course).

Thanks!