Information

July 12, 2013July 12, 2013

Is this automated Musa phylogeny any good?

PhyloGenerator is “an open-source, stand-alone Python program, that makes use of pre-existing sequence data and taxonomic information to largely automate the estimation of phylogenies.” Sounds intriguing, no? I found out about it via this Twitter exchange with Rich Grenyer:

@rich_ @Phalaropus Sure, of course!

— AgroBioDiverse (@AgroBioDiverse) July 11, 2013

He very kindly shared his automatically generated Musa phylogeny, which is reproduced below. I’m afraid you’ll have to click on the image to read the species names.

So now I’m reaching out to all you banana taxonomists out there. Does this make any sense?

July 11, 2013

Yammering away

If you’re at all interested in yams, you should really be following the Twitter feed of the 5th International Conference on Comparative Biology of Monocotyledons. Just use #MonocotsV.

July 10, 2013July 9, 2013

Nibbles: Tree ID, Pyramid scheme, Looking ahead, Fun with mould, GM wheat, Sinai reclaimed

Stuff that’s been sitting around while I’ve been lying on a beach:

Speaking of apps for agriculture, here’s one that identifies North American trees.
R. Ford Denison spots the weakness in an afro-forestry get-rich-quick scheme.
Public Radio International has a big series on feeding the 9 billion — and wants photos of your lunch.
I’ve no idea why people are squeamish about smut. Huitlacoche is my personal favourite among Smithsonian MAG’s Four Fungi Fit For Your Plate.
No idea what’s happened lately to Monsanto’s GM wheat fiasco. Is the US National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation off the hook?
And something old yet new: reclaiming the Sinai for agriculture by reviving an ancient river.

July 9, 2013July 9, 2013

Nibbles: CePaCT aroids, Chinese pigs, Vanuatu banana processing, Yam meeting, AAB meeting, Araucaria, Aquaculture, Malting barley, CIRAD baobab videos, US wine, Ancient grains, Barcode centre

The Pacific pushes out its taros.
China holds on to its pigs.
Vanuatu preserves its bananas.
The world talks about yams in particular. And crop breeding in general.
How Britain got its monkey puzzles.
Bangladesh goes for mola culture. But not only.
Australia puts money into beer.
France gets into the whole baobab factsheet thing, but with a video twist.
Virginia makes wine. With infographic goodness.
UK tries to slow down its food.
Canada barcodes everything.

July 8, 2013July 9, 2013

There are apps for agrobiodiversity

More from the IT geeks at ICARDA. We’ve heard that they’ve been testing out, for the second field season now, and very successfully, a germplasm collecting form app on a tablet equipped with a 3G SIM from a local (European country) provider. This replaced the conventional collecting expedition complement of GPS, altimeter, camera and stack of paper collecting forms, laboriously filled in pencil. It also provided additional services, such as a taxonomic spell-checker (based on the GRIN-Taxonomy database). And it can be used as a navigation device too, comparing your location from the built-in GPS with the latitude and longitude of historical collecting sites to give you directions, via Google Maps. We look forward to a more official update from our ICARDA friends in due course. By chance, we also heard today about another plant genetic resources app, this time to record phenotypes. I’m sure there’s more out there. Let us know if you come across one that you like.