- Cotton domestication deconstructed.
- Sunflower domestication deconstructed too.
- Chocolate smell deconstructed.
- Exotic (North American) wild berries deconstructed.
- “Heirloom” deconstructed.
- XXIII Regional agrobiodiversity seminar and the X Regional traditional seed market. The region being Contestado, in Brazil. Deconstruction not available.
Taking tomato improvement to the masses
It’s basically your standard I-found-redemption-in-a-tomato-heirloom story:
Another life somewhere in the pastoral wilds of Co Kilkenny, in a summer long ago, the wife of a Finnish jewellerymaker brought slices of tomato to the lunch table: slices a centimetre thick, a hand’s breadth across, jewel-bright with olive oil and scattered with chopped green basil. This simple revelation of what tomatoes should be, enfolded in mouthfuls of sweetness and scent, set my early hankering for the good life.
But this piece in the Irish Times did teach me something for a change. It taught me there’s something called the EU-Sol project “to improve the quality of the tomatoes and potatoes we eat.” But there’s more to it than that: check out the bits of its website aimed at the general public and schools.
Nibbles: Kiss apple, Cryptic variation, Brewing yeast history, Sandalwood genebank, Large chile, Red dye, Grassland, Fish eco-labeling, Radiation
- Koreans breed bite-sized apple for breath-freshening. Why can’t I find a picture?
- Climate change bad for genetic diversity too. Tell that to taro in Cameroon.
- Lager yeast came from South America. Thank you, Argentina! And more on long-distance microbe movement.
- Field Gene Bank of Threatened Plants from the Western Ghats threatened.
- Man’s 16-inch chili may be a record. Get your mind out of the gutter.
- The source of Turkish Red.
- “The proper use of native grasslands is to use them as grasslands…”
- Something fishy about eco-labeling.
- Japanese boffins trying to breed radiation-tolerant rice. Maybe they should look at this map in their search for parents for their crossing programme.
Brainfood: Barley genes, Stability & Diversity, Access & Benefit Sharing,
- Analysis of >1000 single nucleotide polymorphisms in geographically matched samples of landrace and wild barley indicates secondary contact and chromosome-level differences in diversity around domestication genes. They’ve been exchanging genes! Oh, and the site of domestication may be further south.
- Identifying population- and community-level mechanisms of diversity–stability relationships in experimental grasslands. Stability depends on a few dominant species that are out of sync with one another.
- Effective governance of access and benefit-sharing under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Identifies six critical factors that determine the effectiveness of ABS governance.
- Diversity and abundance of arthropods in subtropical rice growing areas in the Brazilian south. They’re abundant! And diverse!
Imminent extinction of bananas … again
Science Friday, a series on the US National Public Radio, last week interviewed Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. Koeppel recently fanned the embers of bananas-are-going-extinct back into a roaring blaze. That particular take on the new races of diseases that threaten the world’s favourite fruit started in a January 2003 article in New Scientist magazine (helpfully summarized by The Guardian) and of course one should always take the sub-editor’s art with a pinch of salt. FAO, not one to miss an opportunity, jumped on the extinction story too, which New Scientist duly covered.
So, extinct, probably not. But if it gets you to care about agricultural biodiversity, I’m all in favour of it.
You can listen to the story from NPR’s site (and read a transcript for good measure). I liked the interview, not because bananas in general are or are not going extinct, but because Koeppel explained so clearly the super-efficient business model that puts bananas on the supermarket shelves at scarily low prices. It is a business model that none of the incumbents is willing to abandon until absolutely necessary, and that makes the cost of entry for a new player, or a new variety, impossibly high.
I also liked Koeppel’s confidence in fingering just one variety — ibota ibota — as his absolute favourite. A quick search session revealed that ibota ibota is quite probably a synonym of Yangambi km5, a banana variety whose name is whispered reverently wherever banana enthusiasts gather. Or maybe it is more complicated than that. Banana stories usually are.