- From GBDBH, a light glimmers: browse and search records of crop collecting missions.
- “Variations in early-season temperatures may alter substantially grapevine yield formation.” For Cab Sauv at any rate.
- Mixture of beans as good as resistant variety against anthracnose disease.
- Genome inversion spurs ecotypic differentiation.
- A review of medicinal plant markets.
- Today’s huge global dataset: “threats to human water security and freshwater biodiversity in global river systems.”
The geography of black rice
Sometimes it pays to spend some time in Genebank Database Hell, if you can fight through the pain.
You may remember a piece recently about the antioxidant properties of black rice. But where does black rice come from? Well, hanging around with the Genesys and GRIN-Global crowd in the past couple of days has allowed me to come up with this map in answer to that deceptively simple question.
In yellow are all the rice accessions from Asia which have coordinates, as recorded in the IRRI database, EURISCO and GRIN. In red are the black rice accessions.
You’d have thought such a map would be pretty easy to make. But you’d be wrong. I had to get an Excel spreadsheet from IRRI with the characterization data, 1 and mash it up with the passport data in Genesys for the same accessions, and then export two separate kmz files and fiddle around in Google Earth. 2 Well, they don’t call it Genebank Database Hell for nothing. But it is getting better, slowly but surely.
Pavlovsk interpretation depends on the kindness of strangers
Can you help provide a precis of this broadcast, “Results of evaluation conducted by the expert commission regarding the state of lands belonging to the Pavlovsk Experiment Station.”
And thanks to commenter Mike H for the link to the VIR site.
Scientist of bees gets genius grant
Latest MacArthur Fellows include: 3
Marla Spivak … an entomologist who is developing practical applications to protect honey bee populations from decimation by disease while making fundamental contributions to our understanding of bee biology.
A pedant speaks: Let’s hope she can also tackle some of the diseases that do more than decimate.
Nibbles: Pavlovsk, Baobab hybridization, Jackfruit, Vavilovia, Cowpea education, Lead, Bees, Banana wilt, Dariy cows, Pavlovsk, Drylands, School gardens, Genetic diversity in botanic gardens
- The value of Pavlovsk. Jeremy delivers a slap.
- CIRAD on kinky sex among the baobabs.
- “I had never heard that there were distinct varieties of the jackfruit, although of course such a thing was reasonable, so I naturally wanted very much to taste one.” Naturally.
- Wild relative of pea gets a weird hybrid in-ex situ conservation treatment.
- A Cowpea Story, an illustrative children’s book by Vicky Inniss-Palmer, tells the hopeful story of a cowpea named Catalina and her struggle to overcome illness and disease with the help of scientists. Meanwhile, scientists meet.
- Urban gardeners, beware lead. And nurture your pollinators.
- Reading this, anyone would think nobody had ever researched banana Xanthomonas wilt.
- Improved dairying in Kenya.
- Vavilov Institute’s comprehensive update on Pavlovsk.
- ICRISAT to put in place new market-oriented strategy which will use a “systems perspective in setting our priorities to ensure that all important issues along the dryland agriculture value chain are addressed.”
- Meanwhile, ASARECA asks for ideas on how to intensify one of those dryland systems in the face of climate change.
- ICIMOD promotes herbal gardens in schools.
- Botanic gardens get wrists slapped over their inattention to genetics.