- Breeding maize for high yields limits its plasticity.
- “The rich ate fine, floured wheat bread. But if you were poor you cut your teeth on rye and black bread.”
- USA, MLS and ITPGRFA.
- Rethinking conservation. Again.
- Content-free article on growing rice in slightly salty water.
- BBC catches up with coffee rust.
- Making animal feed sustainable. Easier said than done.
Nibbles: Halloween roots, Fred’s great potatoes, Ellis on TV, CIP genebank online, Weird potato, Weird watermelon, Paul Gepts, Caucasian sheep, Livestock hybrids, COP23
- Halloween is an agricultural thing. Basically.
- Frederick the Great had a thing for potatoes. Among other things.
- CIP genebank manager on TV. He has a thing for potatoes too. As you can tell from his new website.
- Pop quiz: Can you find this N American potato in the CIP genebank?
- The extraordinary story of the ancient Native American crookneck watermelon. Bet it goes well with S. jamesii.
- Paul Gepts gets award. No word on his thoughts on potatoes, but he does like beans.
- Transhumance lives in the Caucasus.
- What in tarnation is a zubron?
- Making the case for climate action on agriculture at COP23. And vice versa.
Brainfood: Rice introgression, African rice cores, Cereal domestication rates, Power vegetables, Biodiversity services, Afrikaner cattle diversity, Conservation funding
- Introgression from cultivated rice alters genetic structures of wild relative populations: implications for in situ conservation. Not totally wild any more.
- Genetic Variation and Population Structure of Oryza glaberrima and Development of a Mini-Core Collection Using DArTseq. 2,179 accessions, 5 geographic groups, 16% recover >95% of polymorphisms.
- Geographic mosaics and changing rates of cereal domestication. Applying fancy maths to archaeobotanical remains shows that selection pressures varied in time, and started slow.
- Tapping the economic and nutritional power of vegetables. Eat your veggies, damn it!
- To what extent can ecosystem services motivate protecting biodiversity? Not enough.
- Genetic diversity of Afrikaner cattle in southern Africa. 3 groups, but not geographically determined, and lots of diversity despite recent declines in numbers.
- Nominal 30-m Cropland Extent Map of Continental Africa by Integrating Pixel-Based and Object-Based Algorithms Using Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 Data on Google Earth Engine. Next level. But when will be be able to distinguish crops?
- Reductions in global biodiversity loss predicted from conservation spending. But the impact of spending goes down with with increasing development pressure.
Brainfood: Wild rice double, Paspalum evaluation, Industrial cassava, Intercropping meta-analysis, Chinese cotton, Power of words, Sampling, Biodiversity threats, Mung bean diversity, Chestnut core, Olive double, Durian genome
- Unlocking the genetic diversity of the undomesticated rice relative Oryza longistaminata. Natural hybrids discovered in IRRI genebank can accelerate breeding.
- Evidence for mid-Holocene rice domestication in the Americas. Another rice domestication?
- Evaluation and strategies of tolerance to water stress in Paspalum germplasm. A species for every purpose.
- Evaluation of Cassava Germplasm Accessions for High Tuber Yield and Starch Content for Industrial Exploitations. Watch Me681 take over. At least in India.
- Does intercropping enhance yield stability in arable crop production? A meta-analysis. Yes.
- Collection, Evaluation and Utilization of Cotton Germplasm. Over a thousand accessions!
- Treasure in the vault: The guardianship of ‘heritage’ seeds, fruit and vegetables. “Treasure” is a loaded term.
- Will the same ex situ protocols give similar results for closely related species? Yep.
- Global Hotspots of Conflict Risk between Food Security and Biodiversity Conservation. Madagascar is particularly worrying.
- Genetic diversity assessment of a set of introduced mung bean accessions (Vigna radiata L.). Germplasm from USDA genebank could be useful in China.
- Database of European chestnut cultivars and definition of a core collection using simple sequence repeats. Not sure you can call it European when 96 of 118 accessions are from Spain, but anyway.
- Genome of wild olive and the evolution of oil biosynthesis. Two genes explain all that oil…
- Did Greek colonisation bring olive growing to the north? An integrated archaeobotanical investigation of the spread of Olea europaea in Greece from the 7th to the 1st millennium BC. …which would have been intensely interesting to early Bronze Age elites.
- The draft genome of tropical fruit durian (Durio zibethinus). “Transcriptomic analysis showed upregulation of sulfur-, ethylene-, and lipid-related pathways in durian fruits.” You don’t say. Let’s engineer them into olives. Paleopolyploidizations here too, as in olives.
Brainfood: Antioxidant adzuki, Sorghum gaps, Natural rubber diversity, Non-flying geese
- Phytochemical distribution and antioxidant activities of Korean adzuki bean (Vigna angularis) landraces. A cluster of about 10% of 200 Korean landraces have higher antioxidant activity, and smaller seeds. Watch them take over the world.
- Sorghum germplasm from West and Central Africa maintained in the ICRISAT genebank: Status, gaps, and diversity. Lots of gaps, but Nigeria isn’t one of them.
- A century of guayule: Comprehensive genetic characterization of the US national guayule (Parthenium argentatum A. Gray) germplasm collection. The future of natural rubber is in Texas.
- Contribution of both positive selection and relaxation of selective constraints to degeneration of flyability during geese domestication. Wild geese chased no longer due to strong selection on mitochondrial respiratory chain genes.