- The genetic identity of the earliest human-made hybrid animals, the kungas of Syro-Mesopotamia. According to 4500 year old DNA, these super-donkeys were sterile crosses between female domestic donkeys and wild male asses. I guarantee nothing below will be as much fun as this.
- Haplotype analyses reveal novel insights into tomato history and domestication driven by long-distance migrations and latitudinal adaptations. I was wrong. Turns out tomatoes came about by one wild species evolving into a semi-domesticated one during a gradual migration from the Peruvian deserts to the Mexican rainforests and that fully domesticated Peruvian and Ecuadorian populations were the result of more recent back-migrations.
- Semi-natural habitats promote winter survival of wild-living honeybees in an agricultural landscape. Wrong again. Rare wild honeybees have been found in Galician power poles.
- High-resolution association mapping with libraries of immortalized lines from ancestral landraces. Actually, immortal landraces sound pretty cool too.
- From cultivar mixtures to allelic mixtures: opposite effects of allelic richness between genotypes and genotype richness in wheat. Mixtures of inbred lines are generally better than pure stands for coping with blotch disease, but sometimes specific allelic combinations undermine this. Well, ancient super-donkeys it ain’t, but still.
- Local communities’ perceptions of wild edible plant and mushroom change: A systematic review. The literature shows that local people are worried about the decreased abundance of the wild plants they rely on for food and nutrition security.
- Weeds Enhance Pollinator Diversity and Fruit Yield in Mango. That should be “weeds.” They’re not weeds if they’re actually useful. Maybe some of them are even edible.
- Multilateral benefit-sharing from digital sequence information will support both science and biodiversity conservation. We need a multilateral DSI benefit-sharing system which decouples access to DSI from sharing the benefits of DSI use. Where have I heard that before? And can I hear more about ancient hybrid super-donkeys instead?
- Diversity of Fusarium associated banana wilt in northern Viet Nam. The dreaded TR4 is still rare, but the pathogen lurks among the wild species too.
- Payments for Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources in Agriculture: One Size Fits All? I wonder what size would fit a hybrid super-donkey.
Nibbles: CIAT genebank, Rome food museum, Sea farming, Hemp, Community seed bank, Indian MAPs
- CIAT’s new genebank is a real looker.
- Rome’s new cooking museum sounds like fun.
- Give seaweed salad a chance.
- What the hell is happening with hemp in the US?
- The College of the Rockies really wants to put its genebank to work for the local community.
- NBPGR building awareness of the importance of medicinal and aromatic plants in Arunachal Pradesh.
White strawberry privileged
Great piece from the always reliable Gastro Obscura on Chile’s white strawberry. It truly has all the canonical agrobiodiversity tropes: interdependence for diversity, the importance of wild relatives, the downside of reforestation, genetic erosion and how chefs can help. Oh, and biopiracy. The only thing that’s missing, in fact, is genebanks. Can’t have everything. But it could be used to teach the subject.
Millet, anyone?
…But millet, a major crop in both Africa and Asia and one of the world’s most nutritious cereals, is now under threat. Production is decreasing and many families have flattened the wooden granaries where they used to store the crop, using them as firewood. A dish of millet bread and pigeon peas-groundnut stew is no longer a common traditional meal in many households.
That’s from a recent BBC Follow the Food feature by Pascal Kwesiga entitled Why we need to expand our crop menu. In addition to finger and pearl millet in Uganda and Kenya, the piece looks at the diversity of grapevine in Portugal, cacao in Brazil and avocado in the USA. There’s also a bit on coffee cryo at the National Laboratory for Genetic Research Preservation at Ft Collins.
Follow the Food is a multimedia series by BBC Future and BBC World News that investigates how agriculture is responding to the profound challenges of climate change, environmental degradation and rapidly growing populations that face our global food supply chains. Follow the Food traces emerging answers to these problems – both high-tech and low-tech, local and global – from farmers, growers and researchers across six continents.
All in association with Corteva (sic).
Save SID!
Some troubling news that we missed back in December 1:
A recent assessment of the Seed Information Database (SID) for compliance with UK legislation on website accessibility (Public Sector Bodies [Websites and Mobile Applications] Accessibility Regulations 2018; themselves aligned with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at the AA standard) found the web interface deficient in several respects. Regrettably, due to RBG Kew’s need to prioritise its limited resources, we will be unable to remedy the faults; and the SID web interface will be taken down at the end of this financial year (March 2022).
Now, SID is absolutely essential to the work of genebanks (among many others), so lack of access to it, even for a short period as Kew figures out what to do, would be a Very Bad Thing.
SID is a compilation of seed biological trait data from the MSBP’s own collections and from other published and unpublished sources. Its primary purpose is as an internal source of a variety of seed biological information; for use in large scale analysis and decision support for seed conservation operations.
In an effort to try to prevent any suspension in access, the International Network for Seed-based Restoration (INSR) has a short survey out. Please consider filling it out and adding your voice to those of many seed scientists, genebank curators and restoration practitioners around the world who don’t want SID to go.