- Living Links Connecting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Small-Scale Farmers and Agricultural Biodiversity. Want to address a whole bunch of SDGs at once? Here’s a tip…
- Archaeology for Sustainable Agriculture. Sustainability is not forever.
- A Congo Basin ethnographic analogue of pre-Columbian Amazonian raised fields shows the ephemeral legacy of organic matter management. Another example of the above?
- Genebank Phenomics: A Strategic Approach to Enhance Value and Utilization of Crop Germplasm. A lot of useful phenotyping can be done fast and cheap, and genebanks should do it.
- LeafMachine: Using machine learning to automate leaf trait extraction from digitized herbarium specimens. This might help with the above.
- Affordable Phenotyping of Winter Wheat under Field and Controlled Conditions for Drought Tolerance. This certainly could. Basically a supermarket cart with a drone mounted on top of it.
- Plant Breeding Capacity in U.S. Public Institutions. It’s in trouble.
- Redomesticating Almond to Meet Emerging Food Safety Needs. Turning to peach, wild and cultivated, to reduce immunoreactivity and control aflatoxin and Salmonella. Somebody say public breeding is in trouble?
- Genetic variability among Ethiopian sorghum landrace accessions for major agro-morphological traits and anthracnose resistance. From 360 accessions to 10. Let’s hope at least the public sector can get hold of them.
- Review: Genetic and genomic selection as a methane mitigation strategy in dairy cattle. Gotta measure emissions on individual animals.
- Genome sequence and comparative analysis of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) in northern Eurasia. Two domestications, affecting at least a dozen genes. No word on methane.
- Genomes on Canvas: Artist’s Perspective on Evolution of Plant-Based Foods. Crowdsourcing historical images to trace crop evolution.
A Genesys use case for the weekend
I figured today I’d tweet about a cool new feature of Genesys, the online portal to genebank accessions. And I did, but then I thought I should really put it on here too. So here goes.
The use case I’ll consider today is:
I have an accession I like, and I know where it was collected. Show me all other accessions anywhere in the world that come from a roughly similar climate.
Here’s what you do. Hang on to your butts.
When you have selected the accession you like in Genesys, go to Map, and look for this on the far left.
Click on Show Climate…
Then click on your accession on the map. You’ll get a summary description of the climate at that point.
If you then click on List Accessions (bottom left hand corner), you’ll get a list of all accessions from places which are roughly comparable in climate to that of the accession which you clicked. I can explain how that’s calculated separately if people are interested.
Or, you can choose one of those bioclimatic variables listed, decide on some max and min values, go to Filter Accessions on the left of the map, and insert your chosen values in the appropriate place on the menu that should appear (scroll down).
Click on Apply Filters at the top of the menu, and there’s a list of accessions again, this time from places with climates within your chosen limits.
Let me know in comments if you have any questions, or indeed ideas for improvement.
Here’s a PDF of the Twitter thread.
Nibbles: Genebank manual, ABS UK, Mad veggies, Trad oysters, Egyptian diets, Cotton politics, #ArtGenetics
- How to run the Nepal genebank.
- UK government advice on ABS.
- Traditional vegetables in Madagascar get some help at last.
- Traditional, sustainable oyster management. Unfortunately the people who knew about it are now in Oklahoma.
- Eat like an (ancient) Egyptian.
- Pakistan and China make a very big thing of exchanging some cotton germplasm.
- Tracking crop evolution through paintings.
Visualizing the use of crop diversity
A couple of nice infographics for you today. Here’s one on forage genetic resources conservation and use, courtesy of the CGIAR Research Programme on Livestock. Click on the numbers to see the interactive elements.
And here, from Euroseeds, is an explanation of how gene editing could save beloved beloved grape varieties from fungal pests without (hopefully) changing their taste or wine-making features. This one is not interactive, though, so download the PDF to see it properly.
And yes, attentive readers will have noticed that both were included in Nibbles yesterday, but I thought they deserved re-upping, as the cool kids say.
Nibbles: Coconut & biodiversity, Nutrition, Maize volatiles, Tea history, OFS online, AGRA, Forage breeding, Grapevine editing, SDG indicators, Black Lives Matter
- Coconut oil is the new palm oil? And not in a good way.
- The cost of poor diets is considerable.
- Maize plants call natural enemies for help against stemborers. And there’s variation in how well they do it, natch.
- Fortune’s fortune: the colonization of tea. With added poison. And capitalism.
- The Oxford Food Symposium is on, virtually. Registration is closed, but follow on the blog, social media etc.
- Criticism of the Green Revolution approach to African agricultural development.
- Forages, from genebanks to farmers, in one interactive infographic.
- Saving Sangiovese through gene editing: the infographic. Not interactive, though, alas.
- How FAO keeps track of progress on the SDGs.
- How to not be a racist in the plant sciences.