- The potential of desho grass (Pennisetum pedicellatum Trin.) for animal feed and land management practices in Ethiopia: A review. “Physiologically, desho grass has a peculiar characteristic of drought tolerance, ability to produce large biomass per unit of land.”
- Wheat genetic resources in the post-genomics era: promise and challenges. Need to go for more wide crosses, which requires more cytological expertise.
- Native seed trade of herbaceous species for restoration: a European policy perspective with global implications. Current policies are inadequate.
- Screening African Rice (Oryza glaberrima) for Tolerance to Abiotic Stresses: II. Lowland Drought. 4 out of over 2000 accessions are promising.
- Dietary species richness as a measure of food biodiversity and nutritional quality of diets. Number of species consumed is a good indicator of the quality of the diet, across seasons and countries.
- Could taxonomic misnaming threaten the ex situ conservation and the usage of plant genetic resources? Only 3% of Citrullus accessions in major genebank databases correctly named.
- Genetic breeding of silkworms: from traditional hybridization to molecular design. Brave new world.
- Domestication origin and breeding history of the tea plant (Camellia sinensis) in China and India based on nuclear microsatellites and cpDNA sequence data. 3 domestication areas, in China and India.
- Preservation of the genetic diversity of a local common carp in the agricultural heritage rice–fish system. Farmers like to select different colour types.
- Abyssinian pea (Lathyrus schaeferi Kosterin pro Pisum abyssinicum A. Br.) – a problematic taxon. May have been the result of a spontaneous interspecific cross under cultivation.
- Managing and Discovering Agronomically Beneficial Traits in Chickpea Germplasm Collections. Cores, mini-cores and reference sets facilitate use.
- Evaluation of resistance to Blumeria graminis (DC.) f. sp. avenae, in Avena murphyi and A. magna genotypes. In oats, the lower-ploidy species have better resistance.
- Editorial: Plant Phenotyping and Phenomics for Plant Breeding. The name of the game is integration.
- Trade and the equitability of global food nutrient distribution. Trade is important to nutrition.
Photographing dietary quality
People in other cultures are often portrayed as scary or exotic. This has to change. We want to show how people really live. It seemed natural to use photos as data so people can see for themselves what life looks like on different income levels.
That’s Anna Rosling Rönnlund of Gapminder on Dollar Street.
Dollar Street lets you visit many, many homes all over the world. Without travelling.
.@AnnaGapminder uses art and science to create an engaging portrait of how people live and help us make dollars and sense of a complicated world. pic.twitter.com/EeysLLpGjm
— Gates Foundation (@gatesfoundation) January 11, 2018
There are photos of everything from toilets to pets. The food items included are “grains”
“vegetables”
and “spices.”
We know from recent work from our friends at Bioversity and their partners that number of species consumed is a good proxy for the nutritional quality of diets across countries and seasons. I wonder if such photographic documentation can be used to estimate dietary richness, and thus quality?
Nibbles: Development egos, CGN, Fijian adaptation, Seedxit, Fancy coconuts, Seed dealers, Heritage rice, Rumsfeld & biodiversity, Grass-fed beef beef
- Development thinkers pithily skewered.
- CGN’s new brochure.
- Fijian farmers dealing with climate change with diverse, triple-layered systems, and small, phased, staggered planting. Or, common sense.
- Brexit will mean less choice of seeds for British farmers. Maybe.
- £3 for a coconut? Nuts.
- Dealing with seed dealers to speed up new rice variety delivery.
- How about the heirlooms, though? Maybe they can take care of themselves.
- The value of biodiversity is a known unknown.
- Forage quality is known, and decreasing.
I say TME 419, you say TMe-419
We have received an email from Prof. Z.R. Tesfasion, University of Jos, Nigeria:
This is to inform you that the TME-419 cassava being grown by farmers in the South Western and South Eastern Nigeria was bred by me from TMS-30572. There could also be other genotypes (at least 4) being cultivated by farmers within Nigeria.
This was in response to an old post of ours, dating back to 2012, in which we delved into cassava genebank database hell and asked: Is there more than one TME 419 cassava? 1 In particular, we compared cassava accession TMe-419 from the IITA genebank with cassava super-cultivar TME 419, which is making waves in West Africa, as described in IITA’s Improved Cassava Variety Handbook.
Is the shape of the leaf’s central lobe lanceolate or elliptic? Is there or is there not pigmentation on the petiole? Is the colour of the root pulp white/cream or yellow? And does it have a purple cortex or not? A discrepancy in one of these descriptors I might have understood, but it is clear to me that we’re talking here about quite different cassavas.
So I ask IITA: which one is the real TME 419? I mean the one making news in DR Congo and Nigeria.
The answer, thanks to Prof. Tesfasion, is that the cultivar being widely adopted in Nigeria and elsewhere is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the TME 419 described in the Improved Cassava Variety Handbook. The TMe-419 accession is a different thing, the similarity in handles notwithstanding. The name of the former came from a breeding programme, that of the latter from the genebank, and the two of them did not compare notes quite as much as they perhaps should have done. A problem that DOIs will no doubt alleviate in the future.
What’s TMS-30572? Ah, that’s another story.
Nibbles: Irradiated mangoes, PNG genebank, Chinese taro, Strawberry breeding, DNA sequencing, Googling sheep, Weird pineapple, Agroforestry, Olive diversity, Xylella, Fermentation, Pulque & mezcal, Cheese & donkeys, Italian food double, Tomato double, Fairchild, Vanilla history, Potato history, Kelemu
- Did you miss us? Well, we’re making up for lost time today. Buckle up.
- Seafaring mangoes.
- India to help PNG get (another?) genebank.
- Somebody mention taro? The Chinese are coming.
- Strawberries for Christmas.
- Handheld genotyping. Brave new world.
- All the sheep in the world.
- Trees > lungs.
- Pink pineapple. Yeah, why not.
- Tuscan olives are Etruscan.
- Wonder if they’ll survive.
- Fermentation never went away.
- Case in point #1: pulque.
- Which is a cousin of mezcal.
- Case in point #2: cheese.
- Of which this is the most expensive, apparently.
- 2018 is the year of italian food, according to italians.
- Maybe they’ll use this infographic to advertize it.
- The transatlantic history of a mainstay of italian cooking, the tomato.
- Which looks really diverse in the Canaries too.
- “Food spy” is a bit harsh on Fairchild.
- Wonder if he ever collected vanilla.
- Or potatoes.
- Hero is about right for Segenet.