- Jeremy gets into tomato domestication and diversity on his podcast.
- The 2021 Access to Seeds Index Insights Report is out, and includes tomatoes.
- What is the most famous place for coconut varieties?
- A new book attempts to decolonize the peanut.
- Blood and water in Spain.
- A tale of two genebanks: China and Nigeria. Maybe the African Union can help? If not, maybe China might.
- Africa needs help with tree planting too. Maybe follow Italy’s example?
- Though maybe sorghum and millet will be ok.
- Send them to Iraqi farmers?
- Presentations on seed conservation and use in genebanks.
Brainfood: Digitizing collections, Bean core, Livestock diversity, Maya & maize, Fish stocks & CC, Save the weed, Flax CWR, Italian agrobiodiversity
- Cross-validation of a semantic segmentation network for natural history collection specimens. Computers can distinguish the herbarium label from the actual specimen and other stuff on the sheet, helping with the whole automatic digitization thing, but it takes some really fancy math.
- The landscapes of livestock diversity: grazing local breeds as a proxy for domesticated species adaptation to the environment. Medium fancy math used to map breed diversity in the Iberian Peninsula for different livestock species and relate it to environmental factors.
- South-to-north migration preceded the advent of intensive farming in the Maya region. Sort of like tomato, but in the other direction. Plenty of math involved, but behind the scenes, thankfully.
- Timing and magnitude of climate-driven range shifts in transboundary fish stocks challenge their management. Huge amount of data and very fancy math shows fish are in trouble.
- A Core Set of Snap Bean Genotypes Established by Phenotyping a Large Panel Collected in Europe. Ok, even I can follow the math on this one.
- Assessment of biogeographic variation in traits of Lewis flax (Linum lewisii) for use in restoration and agriculture. Very approachable math shows which populations of a CWR can best be used for restoration, and where; and also for domestication and breeding.
- An updated checklist of plant agrobiodiversity of northern Italy. Very useful use of very basic maths. Key number: only 43% of the PGR on the list are conserved ex situ.
- Cannabis, the multibillion dollar plant that no genebank wanted. No math needed to figure out weed needs a genebank.
An apple story a day…
Well, that’s odd. The rush of stories about apples usually happens in the autumn. And yet, just in the past couple of days, quite apart from the tweet about Korbinian Aigner, I have come across:
- An excellent roundup from the Apples & People newsletter.
- A pointer to a webpage on the history of American apples.
- News of newly-bred hypoallergenic varieties.
Oh, and since I have you here, might as well also say that there’s been an update from GRIN-U. No new resources specifically on apples lately, but there’s been a few in the past.
A remarkable pomologist
There was a fascinating tweet yesterday from Trevor & Frances FitzJohn, cider makers in Wairarapa, New Zealand.
One of the most courageous pomologists was Bavarian priest Korbinian Aigner. He was outspoken during WW2 and sent to Dachau concentration camp where he secret continued his apple breeding.
— TeePee Cider (@Trevor_FJ) March 29, 2022
It’s about the Bavarian priest, pomologist and artist Korbinian Aigner. I’m sorry to say I’d never heard of him. He apparently continued his apple breeding efforts even while imprisoned at Dachau.
Between two barracks he planted apple trees, and he even succeeded in breeding new varieties which he named KZ-1, KZ-2, KZ-3 and KZ-4, though by 2016 only KZ-3 (later named the Kobinian Apple in his honor) was still in existence. The saplings were smuggled out of the camp by a young novice nun, who visited the plantations in order to collect fruit and vegetables for a local orphanage.
Alas, I can’t find his KZ-3 variety in any of the usual genebank databases. Has anyone out there come across it?
Brainfood: NPGS use, Descriptor clustering, Fast phenotyping, Flax duplicates, Photosynthesis variation, Brassica breeding, Robusta & CC, Seaweed domestication, Fighting fish domestication, Hotspots & diets, Cotton & wildlife
- Developing country demand for crop germplasm conserved by the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System. 5 years, 10 crops, 100,000 samples.
- cacGMS: An Algorithm Cluster Germplasm based on Categorical Genetic Traits. Build a better cluster algorithm for categorical descriptors and the world will beat a path to your genebank. If it isn’t already.
- Deep learning: as the new frontier in high-throughput plant phenotyping. A really fancy way of scoring those descriptors.
- Selection of duplicates of flax accessions – an important task in the management of collection of genetic resources of Linum usitatissimum L. But you can do a lot with passport data.
- Mining for allelic gold: finding genetic variation in photosynthetic traits in crops and wild relatives. Let the gene editing begin!
- Expanding the genetic variation of Brassica juncea by introgression of the Brassica rapa genome. AABB gets a shot of AA.
- Adaptive potential of Coffea canephora from Uganda in response to climate change. Some populations are going to do better than others under climate change. Ah, but are they the best populations for other traits?
- Pre-domestication bottlenecks of the cultivated seaweed Gracilaria chilensis. Founder effect and over-exploitation mean that more diversity from New Zealand might be needed.
- Genomic consequences of domestication of the Siamese fighting fish. You don’t need huge genetic diversity to get huge phenotypic diversity, even with strong selection. But will new diversity be needed eventually? From Siam?
- Food versus wildlife: Will biodiversity hotspots benefit from healthier diets? Some hotspots will actually do worse if people eat better, so we will have to look at better agriculture too. Including seaweed, for all I know.
- Commodity crops in biodiversity-rich production landscapes: Friends or foes? The example of cotton in the Mid Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe. Possibly an example of the above. Cotton was better for wildlife than what came after prices dropped.