- There’s a sort of mycological culinary hotspot in Yunnan… Yeah, I thought that too.
- Signs found of old banana cultivation in Australia. Well, kinda. As in not as old as in PNG, and not mainland Australia.
- Really, really old horse butchery site in southern England excavated. When the Brits ate horses. Well, kinda.
- New wheat is pretty much like old wheat, gluten-wise at least.
- Breeding better apple rootstocks at USDA. A hitherto somewhat neglected aspect of apple genetic conservation and improvement.
- Speaking of USDA, here’s another job.
Brainfood: Global Food Security, Neutral diversity, Bottlenecks, Slovenian lettuce, Swedish apples, Mungbean diversity, Crop suitability, Breeding graph, Herding diet, Cool shit, Seed storage double, Wild quinoa, Mighty wind
- A research vision for food systems in the 2020s: Defying the status quo. Research is necessary but not sufficient.
- Dismantling a dogma: the inflated significance of neutral genetic diversity in conservation genetics. Not all genetic diversity is created equal.
- A re‐evaluation of the domestication bottleneck from archaeogenomic evidence. Not so much a single bottleneck “event” on domestication, as serial bottlenecks post-domestication. Another dogma dismantled?
- Morphological and genetic diversity of Slovene lettuce landrace ‘Ljubljanska ledenka’ (Lactuca sativa L.). Not all iceberg is created equal.
- Genetic Status of the Swedish Central collection of heirloom apple cultivars. Neutral diversity is not completely useless, though?
- Understanding genetic variability in the mungbean (Vigna radiata L.) genepool. It may not be neutral variation, but it’s not associated with geography. If you see what I mean.
- A Land Evaluation Framework for Agricultural Diversification. Soil and climate data –> fancy maths –> pretty good prediction of where you find a crop.
- A unifying concept of animal breeding programs. You can describe any breeding programme by using graph theory. But would it help?
- Molecular and isotopic evidence for milk, meat, and plants in prehistoric eastern African herder food systems. Chemical and isotope analysis of lipids on ceramic shards shows early herding societies had a pretty diverse diet.
- Pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas identified by human fecal biomarkers in coprolites from Paisley Caves, Oregon. Lipids again, this time at the other end of the process, and of the world.
- Identification of novel seed longevity genes related to oxidative stress and seed coat by genome‐wide association studies and reverse genetics. Seeds need to take their antioxidants.
- Evaluation of genetic integrity of pearl millet seeds during aging by genomic-SSR markers. Loss of viability leads to loss of diversity.
- Geographical distribution of quinoa crop wild relatives in the Peruvian Andes: a participatory mapping initiative. Cultivated land is as important as more “natural” ecosystems for quinoa wild relatives.
- Global wind patterns and the vulnerability of wind-dispersed species to climate change. In the tropics, and in the lee of mountains, wind-dispersed species will find it more difficult to reach places with suitable future climates.
Brainfood: Perennial favourites, Feral grapevines, Silky cat, Damaged yams, Maize vs sorghum, Sunflower ecotypes, Fungal diversity, Pacific voyaging, Vitamin seeds, Biogeoinformatics, Natural language, Evaluation, Aquaculture
- Perennial vegetables: A neglected resource for biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and nutrition. Over 600 perennial veggies on 6% of global vegetable cropland.
- Genomic Evidences Support an Independent History of Grapevine Domestication in the Levant. Separate from what happened in the Caucasus, that is.
- Distribution, prevalence and severity of damages caused by nematodes on yam (Dioscorea rotundata) in Nigeria. A quarter of tubers and half of heaps showed nematode symptoms.
- Maize long-term genetic progress explains current dominance over sorghum in Argentina. Follow the money.
- Phenotypic and physiological responses to salt exposure in Sorghum reveal diversity among domesticated landraces. Salinity tolerance was acquired early but then lost in some geographic regions where it wasn’t needed. See what happens when you invest in a crop?
- Massive haplotypes underlie ecotypic differentiation in sunflowers. It’s the recombination-suppressing inversions, stupid.
- GlobalFungi, a global database of fungal occurrences from high-throughput-sequencing metabarcoding studies. Cool. Do landraces of a crop next.
- The earliest domestic cat on the Silk Road. Coincided with rapid urbanization in the 9th century.
- Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement. Yeah, but did Americans go west of their own accord or in Polynesian boats? And did they have sweetpotatoes with them? And cats?
- Genetic markers associated with seed longevity and vitamin E in diverse Aus rice varieties. 5 markers on 4 chromosomes.
- Biogeoinformatics for the management of Farm Animal Genetic Resources (FAnGR). Software for monitoring erosion and detecting locally adapted genotypes. Plus preserve traditional practices.
- Computing on Phenotypic Descriptions for Candidate Gene Discovery and Crop Improvement. Casually talk about a plant in the field –> fancy math –> the plant’s genotype.
- Data synthesis for crop variety evaluation. A review. Focus on ranking. Oh, to mash it up with the above.
- Scenarios for Global Aquaculture and Its Role in Human Nutrition. For aquaculture to contribute to nutrition it needs enabling trade and economic policies. Well I never.
Nibbles: Capacity building, Training materials, Disease app, Microbes, Suffolk Punch
- How to do capacity development for agricultural innovation.
- Doing capacity development for crop diversity conservation and use.
- Farmers need capacity development too.
- A Svalbard for bacteria.
- The Punch sexed up.
Brainfood: SDGs, Ancient sustainability, Phenomics, Wheat phenotyping, Public breeding, Almond breeding, Ethiopian sorghum, Methane mitigation, Reindeer games, Raised fields, #ArtGenetics
- Living Links Connecting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Small-Scale Farmers and Agricultural Biodiversity. Want to address a whole bunch of SDGs at once? Here’s a tip…
- Archaeology for Sustainable Agriculture. Sustainability is not forever.
- A Congo Basin ethnographic analogue of pre-Columbian Amazonian raised fields shows the ephemeral legacy of organic matter management. Another example of the above?
- Genebank Phenomics: A Strategic Approach to Enhance Value and Utilization of Crop Germplasm. A lot of useful phenotyping can be done fast and cheap, and genebanks should do it.
- LeafMachine: Using machine learning to automate leaf trait extraction from digitized herbarium specimens. This might help with the above.
- Affordable Phenotyping of Winter Wheat under Field and Controlled Conditions for Drought Tolerance. This certainly could. Basically a supermarket cart with a drone mounted on top of it.
- Plant Breeding Capacity in U.S. Public Institutions. It’s in trouble.
- Redomesticating Almond to Meet Emerging Food Safety Needs. Turning to peach, wild and cultivated, to reduce immunoreactivity and control aflatoxin and Salmonella. Somebody say public breeding is in trouble?
- Genetic variability among Ethiopian sorghum landrace accessions for major agro-morphological traits and anthracnose resistance. From 360 accessions to 10. Let’s hope at least the public sector can get hold of them.
- Review: Genetic and genomic selection as a methane mitigation strategy in dairy cattle. Gotta measure emissions on individual animals.
- Genome sequence and comparative analysis of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) in northern Eurasia. Two domestications, affecting at least a dozen genes. No word on methane.
- Genomes on Canvas: Artist’s Perspective on Evolution of Plant-Based Foods. Crowdsourcing historical images to trace crop evolution.