All you need to know if you’re a beekeeper in the UK.
Playing with GBIF
Food composition
The new issue of the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis has reviews of food composition activities in both Latin America and Oceania. I only have access to the abstracts, but I know that in the Pacific a lot of attention is being paid to differences in nutrient composition among varieties of crops like banana, pandanus and giant swamp taro. This is something that might be of interest to the authors of a third paper in the same issue of the journal. They look at differences in micronutrient composition within different cereal species in Mali but fail to mention this varietal dimension. They ascribe the differences to climate and ecology — at least in the abstract. Important, of course, but surely not the whole story. I’m going to try to get hold of the paper.
LATER: So it looks like what they did is collect various different samples of fonio, say, in each of several distinct eco-geographic zones and pool the samples collected in each zone for analysis. Nothing in the paper about trying to collect material with similar varietal names or anything like that. So any differences due to environment will be confounded with genetic variation. Seems to me like an opportunity missed, at best.
Solanaceous information
There’s a global online monograph of the genus Solanum called Solanaceae Source. Each species treatment includes illustrations, a clickable list of specimens, links to molecular data and a dot distribution map (which mashes herbarium specimen locality data with Google Maps), among other things. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds the project as part of the Planetary Biodiversity Inventories mission. Collaborators are eligible for small awards in support of their contributions to the completion of the worldwide Solanum monograph.
Genotyping Support Service
The CGIAR’s Generation Challenge Programme‘s mission is
To use advanced genomics science and plant genetic diversity to overcome complex agricultural bottlenecks that condemn millions of the world’s neediest people to a future of poverty and hunger
They’ve just announced a new service: the Genotyping Support Service. What will GSS do?
Here’s a sample of what our latest service offers: assessing proposals, hiring genotyping services from the best providers, taking care of the administrative hassles, ensuring the generation of high-quality data and training participating researchers to interpret and work with the data to optimise outputs. In this way, researchers get to use the technology right away, while also learning how to get the greatest mileage out of the technology, thus creating local capacity. As such, GSS contributes to GCP’s effort to support and motivate plant breeding ‘champions’ in developing regions.