- Variation in seed longevity among diverse Indica rice varieties. 8 major loci associated with seed longevity.
- Seeds and the Art of Genome Maintenance. Viability is about the DNA repair response. Snap.
- Are Mayan community forest reserves effective in fulfilling people’s needs and preserving tree species? Sure they are.
- The power of argument. People don’t respond to utilitarian arguments when it comes to biodiversity. In the Netherlands.
- Do modern hunter-gatherers live in marginal habitats? Nope. What can I tell ya?
- New evidence on concentration in seed markets. Not as bad as some people think.
- Climate change has likely already affected global food production. From 2003 to 2008, there’s been a ~1% average reduction in consumable food calories in barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat.
- Selection of Heat Tolerant Lablab. 6 out of 44 accessions from the WorldVeg genebank are heat tolerant. Seems a lot.
- Counting the beans: quantifying the adoption of improved mungbean varieties in South Asia and Myanmar. 1.2 million farmers reached by WorldVeg varieties. Lablab next?
- Climate smart agricultural practices and gender differentiated nutrition outcome: An empirical evidence from Ethiopia. They work, but they’re better in combination.
- Pests and diseases of trees in Africa: A growing continental emergency. Into Africa…
- Genetics of adaptation in modern chicken. Not much of a domestication bottleneck; that came later.
- Multi-Trait Diverse Germplasm Sources from Mini Core Collection for Sorghum Improvement. From 40,000 in the genebank, to 242 in the mini-core, to 6 really cool ones (from Yemen, USA, China, Mozambique, and India x2 if you must know).
- Palaeogenomic insights into the origins of French grapevine diversity. Ancient DNA from 28 pips dating back to the Iron Age provides pretty good matches to grapes grown today.
- Global dataset shows geography and life form predict modern plant extinction and rediscovery. Almost 600 plants went extinct in modern times, at least, and I count about 20 crop wild relatives among them.
Brainfood: Habitat restoration, ICRISAT proso, Mobile advice, Cowpea genome, Wheat resilience, World climate, Wheat biogeography, African durum, Microalgae, Gender, Iberian barley adaptation
- Indigenous Grasses for Rehabilitating Degraded African Drylands. Promising results, but it’s not easy.
- Variability in the Global Proso Millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) Germplasm Collection Conserved at the ICRISAT Genebank. Asian, European and mixed clusters, based on morphology. Out of over 800 accessions, 3 (IPm 2069, IPm 2076 and IPm 2537) are rich in grain Fe, Zn, Ca, and protein.
- Household-specific targeting of agricultural advice via mobile phones: Feasibility of a minimum data approach for smallholder context. A little household data goes a long way. Includes crop diversity info?
- The genome of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata [L.] Walp.). There’s a gene for multiple organ gigantism.
- Reduced response diversity does not negatively impact wheat climate resilience. The suggestion that the statistical methods used were faulty means wheat may not be as in trouble in Europe as a previous paper suggested.
- Evaluating WorldClim Version 1 (1961–1990) as the Baseline for Sustainable Use of Forest and Environmental Resources in a Changing Climate. Maybe not as good as it might be. But what’s the alternative?
- Worldwide phylogeography and history of wheat genetic diversity. Three groups, with one (the Asian genepool) hardly used in breeding.
- Durum Wheat (Triticum durum Desf.): Origin, Cultivation and Potential Expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa. From the Ethiopian highlands and Saharan oases to the mainstream?
- Global mapping of cost‐effective microalgal biofuel production areas with minimal environmental impact. The dry coasts of N and E Africa, the Middle East, and western S America. But how minimal is minimal?
- From women’s empowerment to food security: Revisiting global discourses through a cross-country analysis. The patriarchy is resourceful.
- Genetic association with high‐resolution climate data reveals selection footprints in the genomes of barley landraces across the Iberian Peninsula. Cold temperature, late‐season frost occurrence and water availability have driven landrace genetic differentiation.
Brainfood: Plant blindness, African goats, Tissue culture, Phenotyping databases, Mekong transformation, African Fertile Crescent, Salty tomatoes, Pigeonpea domestication, Pharaonic watermelon, Apple domestication, Social media and PAs, Messaging, De novo domestication
- Resetting the table for people and plants: Botanic gardens and research organizations collaborate to address food and agricultural plant blindness. There are so many ways to get people interested in plants.
- A review on goats in southern Africa: an untapped genetic resource. 500-600 years of natural selection must count for something.
- Agromorphologic, genetic and methylation profiling of Dioscorea and Musa species multiplied under three micropropagation systems. Methylation at some loci, but no phenotypic differences.
- Modelling Crop Genetic Resources Phenotyping Information Systems. Field to figures.
- Agricultural and food systems in the Mekong region: Drivers of transformation and pathways of change. Corn everywhere.
- Yam genomics supports West Africa as a major cradle of crop domestication. The Niger River Basin, to be precise. How long before corn takes over?
- A diversity of traits contributes to salinity tolerance of wild Galapagos tomatoes seedlings. 3 out of 67 accessions of 2 wild endemic species showed particularly high salinity tolerance.
- Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp. origins and domestication: the South and Southeast Asian archaeobotanical evidence. Here’s ground zero for domestication about 5000 years ago: 19.397833, 80.813132.
- A 3500-year-old leaf from a Pharaonic tomb reveals that New Kingdom Egyptians were cultivating domesticated watermelon. A Nile Valley origin?
- Origins of the Apple: The Role of Megafaunal Mutualism in the Domestication of Malus and Rosaceous Trees. Large fruits originally evolved to attract wild horses, deer and bears, which spread them far and wide; populations isolated by the Ice Age were brought back together by humans.
- Assessing global popularity and threats to Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas using social media data. Accessibility and infrastructure more important than biodiversity.
- Messaging matters: A systematic review of the conservation messaging literature. Communications professionals think that more input from communications professionals is needed for conservation professionals to communicate professionally.
- De Novo Domestication: An Alternative Route toward New Crops for the Future. Lots to play with, that’s for sure.
Brainfood: Napier diversity, Clover expansion, Social media & conservation, Orphan crops double, Rewilding chestnut, N-fixing trees, Horse diversity double, Steppe weed, Old medicinals, Wild dates, Sorghum resistance
- Genotyping by sequencing provides new insights into the diversity of Napier grass (Cenchrus purpureus) and reveals variation in genome-wide LD patterns between collections. Complementarity between ILRI and Embrapa collections.
- Breaking Free: the Genomics of Allopolyploidy-facilitated Niche Expansion in White Clover. From two quite different, specialized habitats, to a global presence, through polyploidy.
- Likes, comments, and shares of marine organism imagery on Facebook. Use really nice pictures, and don’t worry too much about the captions.
- African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC): status of developing genomic resources for African orphan crops. 150 African breeders trained, one or more forms of sequence data produced for 60 crops, reference genome sequences for 6 species published, 6 near completion, 19 in progress.
- The role of genetics in mainstreaming the production of new and orphan crops to diversify food systems and support human nutrition. Well it’s a good job there’s the above, then.
- Evaluation of sites for the reestablishment of the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) in northeast Georgia, USA. Overwhelmingly on federal land, which may or may not be a good thing.
- Patterns of nitrogen‐fixing tree abundance in forests across Asia and America. Much rarer in Asia than in the Americas.
- Tracking Five Millennia of Horse Management with Extensive Ancient Genome Time Series. Iberian and Siberian domesticated horse lineages went extinct, but the Muslim conquests injected some much-needed diversity.
- Chinese Mongolian horses may retain early domestic male genetic lineages yet to be discovered. Wait, does Mongolian=Siberian?
- Cannabis in Asia: its center of origin and early cultivation, based on a synthesis of subfossil pollen and archaeobotanical studies. The northeastern Tibetan Plateau, to be precise, with the first steppe communities.
- Paleomedicine and the use of plant secondary compounds in the Paleolithic and Early Neolithic. Self-medication goes back a long time.
- Genetic characterization of tertiary relict endemic Phoenix theophrasti populations in Turkey and phylogenetic relations of the species with other palm species revealed by SSR markers. Probably endangered.
- Genome wide association analysis of sorghum mini core lines regarding anthracnose, downy mildew, and head smut. 9 photo-sensitive and 4 photo insensitive accessions are multiple sources for resistance to anthracnose, SDM and head smut.
Nibbles: Retiring Ellis, Teff patent, Rice in Bangladesh, Indian wild wheat, Livestock wild relatives, Bambara groundnut, Han diversity, Danone cultures, Drumming, IPBES, World Bee Day, Agroforestry
- Dave Ellis retires, world celebrates. Wait, that came out wrong…
- The Dutch teff patent saga.
- Saving rice diversity in Bangladesh.
- Conserving and using wild wheat in India.
- Livestock have wild relatives too.
- It’s the “minor” crops, stupid.
- The most expensive pistachios in the world.
- Human diversity and domestication in E Asia, summarized in a cool map.
- Open yoghurt.
- The connection between Nigerian music and watermelons. Yes, there is one.
- Summarizing reaction to IPBES.
- Happy World Bee Day.
- Oh, and I almost forgot, follow the livestream of the World Congress on Agroforestry.