- Vulnerability of U.S. new and industrial crop genetic resources. More germplasm (especially wild relatives) and breeders are needed in the US of castor bean, gumweed, guar, guayule, kenaf, roselle, safflower, sesame, sunn hemp, rubber dandelion and Vernonia.
- Safeguarding Plant Genetic Resources in the U.S. But the conservation system itself has its challenges, due to climate change.
- Operationalizing cultural adaptation to climate change: contemporary examples from United States agriculture. But climate change is not the only thing that agriculture (and possibly the conservation system too) needs to adapt to.
- Efforts to cryopreserve shrimp (Penaeid) genetic resources and the potential for a shrimp germplasm bank in the United States. Sure, why not, let them eat shrimp.
- Mother Tubers of Wild Potato Solanum jamesii can Make Shoots Five Times. Are enough populations of this thing in genebanks, I wonder? No, not compared to shrimps.
- ‘Hybrid’ US sheep breeder used endangered genetic material, faces jail. Yes, I know this is not peer-reviewed, but would you have left it out of this American round-up?
Nibbles: Indian millets, Indian rice, Neolithic bread, Andean potatoes, UAE genebank, Niger onions, Lentil domestication, Italian rice, Sea cucumber
- The trouble with millets. Because there’s always room for a Star Trek allusion.
- Growing heritage rice varieties in Goa. With hardly any trouble, it seems.
- Really, really old bread. And more from Jeremy.
- Breeding company and CIP collaborating to save potato diversity in the Andes.
- Another genebank opens in the Gulf.
- The story of Niger’s Violet De Galmi onion. Or is it Niger’s?
- The latest crop to be called humble is the lentil.
- New varieties may help save risotto, but better water management will probably have to feature too, I suspect. Otherwise lentils could stand in I suppose.
- In the end, though, maybe we should all just cultivate sea cucumbers.
Nibbles: Cider exhibit, Dog domestication, Nordic rye, Orkney barley, Tunisian wheat, IPR in Kenya, Future Seeds, Seed & herbarium resources
- The Museum of Cider has an exhibition on “A Variety of Cultures.”
- Nice podcast rounding up the latest on dog domestication.
- Useful summary of the history of rye in the Nordic countries since it replaced barley in the Medieval period.
- They didn’t give up barley in the Outer Hebrides.
- The Tunisian farmer goes back to wheat landraces (I think).
- The Kenyan farmers who want to exchange landraces.
- El Colombiano visits Future Seeds, evokes The Walking Dead.
- Seed saving resources from the California Seed Bank and the herbarium at the University of California, Berkeley.
Brainfood: Archaeology edition
- Early human selection of crops’ wild progenitors explains the acquisitive physiology of modern cultivars. The high leaf nitrogen, photosynthesis, conductance and transpiration of crops was already there in their wild relatives, the first farmers just happened to domesticate greedy plants.
- The impact of farming on prehistoric culinary practices throughout Northern Europe. When the first farmers arrived in northern Europe armed with their greedy plants, they learned a lot about food from the local hunter-fisher-gatherers, and vice-versa, but without much interbreeding. Jeremy interviews one of the authors on his podcast.
- Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe. There was extensive interbreeding between farmers and the local transitional foragers/herders before with the expansion of pastoralist groups into Europe from the Eurasian steppes around 3300 BC.
- Isotopes prove advanced, integral crop production, and stockbreeding strategies nourished Trypillia mega-populations. The earliest European mega-settlements, in Ukraine and Moldova, from around 4000 BCE, integrated greedy crops and generous domesticated livestock.
- Inference of Admixture Origins in Indigenous African Cattle. Following introduction from the Near East, domesticated cattle got admixed with a North African extinct aurochs before spreading throughout Africa.
- Flax for seed or fibre use? Flax capsules from ancient Egyptian sites (3rd millennium BC to second century AD) compared with modern flax genebank accessions. Fibre first.
- Revealing the secrets of a 2900-year-old clay brick, discovering a time capsule of ancient DNA. DNA from 34 plant groups were detected inside an old brick when it happened to break.
- Making wine in earthenware vessels: a comparative approach to Roman vinification. Comparison with modern counterparts shows that Roman clay jars for storing wine were integral to the process. No word on whether there was any ancient DNA in the clay.
- Breadfruit in the Pacific Islands, its domestication and origins of cultivars grown in East Polynesia and Micronesia. Spoiler alert: they came from Polynesian Outlier Islands.
Canaries in the genetic coal mine
Specialism in science being what it is, it’s understandably unusual to see papers which combine combine analysis of genetic diversity in humans over time with that of crops, or indeed livestock. It’s less understandable why it should also be unusual in science journalism, and examples should be celebrated. So hats off to Warren Cornwall for his very readable synthesis in Science of the history of human and crop genetic diversity in the Canaries over the past two thousand years. Well worth a read.
References