- A million bucks to save lettuce.
- Genebank provides seeds shock.
- The genebank of the future will provide data.
- How to talk about genebanks (among other things).
- A sorghum variety to keep an eye on.
- The past, present and future of Cinchona.
- Ancient genomics of people and dogs: compare and contrast.
- Looking (up) to pastoralists for answers.
Nibbles: BSF, GNR2020, AI, IITA, Papa, Volcani, Yu, aDNA
- The ITPGRFA’s Benefit Sharing Fund at work.
- Remembering the Global Nutrition Report. Yes, I know it was only a few days ago.
- Measuring poverty from space.
- Interview with IITA’s genebank manager.
- Humble-bragging the potato. In Spanish.
- The Israeli genebank in the news.
- Seed saving in China.
- DNA from ancient Egyptian emmer.
Potato atlas returns to life
I have decided to relaunch the potato and sweetpotato atlas sites — completed while working with CIP, but now personal — in hope that with active collaboration, they can become more current and relevant.
That’s from the very brave Kelly Theisen, on the World Potato Atlas site. We’ll see how both develop, and do what we can to help. The country chapters from the original versions of both atlases, which date back to the 1980’s, are also on there.
Nibbles: Kenya forests, Australian grasses, Jackfruit processing, Turin fruit museum
- Safeguarding Kenya’s forests the local way.
- The latest from the Dark Emu guy. Is this how Australian Aborigines farmed?
- Adding value to jackfruit in India.
- No jackfruit in this astonishing collection of fruit diversity in wax, alas.
Brainfood: Red Listing, Name checking, Diversification, New breeding, Seed data, Tea genome, Sampling strategies, Plum diversity, Fruit taste, Enset seeds, Maize & nutrition, Emilian grapes
- Caution Needed When Predicting Species Threat Status for Conservation Prioritization on a Global Scale. Automated rapid preliminary assessments are all well and good, but…
- WorldFlora: An R package for exact and fuzzy matching of plant names against the World Flora Online Taxonomic Backbone data. Automated rapid taxonomic name checking is all well and good, but…
- Diverse approaches to crop diversification in agricultural research. A review. Too diverse.
- Reinventing quantitative genetics for plant breeding: something old, something new, something borrowed, something BLUE. Retire additive variance.
- Nikolaeva et al.’s reference book on seed dormancy and germination. A treasure trove of data comes to light.
- The reference genome of tea plant and resequencing of 81 diverse accessions provide insights into genome evolution and adaptation of tea plants. Three groups, originating in SW China.
- Taxonomic similarity does not predict necessary sample size for ex situ conservation: a comparison among five genera. The old rule-of-thumb of 50 individuals was not all that far off after all.
- Genetic assessment of the pomological classification of plum Prunus domestica L. accessions sampled across Europe. 93 unique accessions out of 104 across 14 partners. Pretty good, no?
- Genome‐wide association of volatiles reveals candidate loci for blueberry flavor. Can predict taste from genetics.
- Germination ecology of wild and domesticated Ensete ventricosum: Evidence for maintenance of sexual reproductive capacity in a vegetatively propagated perennial crop. Seeds from domesticated material are not much different from the wild ones, except in germination niche.
- Mining maize diversity and improving its nutritional aspects within agro‐food systems. Biofortification is only the beginning.
- Genetic Characterization of Grapevine Varieties from Emilia-Romagna (Northern Italy) Discloses Unexplored Genetic Resources. About half (62) of the unique accessions (122) in a collection (178) are hardly known.