Category: Mainstream

• The recent evolutionary rescue of a staple crop depended on over half a century of global germplasm exchange. Sorghum in Haiti was saved from pest by breeders mixing up material from all over the place.
• Does crop genetic diversity support positive biodiversity effects under experimental drought? Not straightforwardly, at least for barley cultivar mixtures in pots.
• A Nutrition-Sensitive Agroecology Intervention in Rural Tanzania Increases Children’s Dietary Diversity and Household Food Security But Does Not Change Child Anthropometry: Results from a Cluster-Randomized Trial. Well at least it’s more straightforward than the above.
• The tepary bean genome provides insight into evolution and domestication under heat stress. Better heat adaptation than common bean, but less disease and pest resistance.
• The international political process around Digital Sequence Information under the Convention on Biological Diversity and the 2018–2020 intersessional period. Can’t take the above for granted.
• Practical consequences of digital sequence information (DSI) definitions and access and benefit‐sharing scenarios from a plant genebank’s perspective. Genebanks trying not to take the above for granted.
• Cryopreservation of Woody Crops: The Avocado Case. There’s been a breakthrough in shoot tip cryopreservation.
• Using Regulatory Flexibility to Address Market Informality in Seed Systems: A Global Study. Regulatory flexibility would certainly be a breakthrough for linking formal and informal seed systems. And, incidentally, not bad for DSI either.
• A recipe development process model designed to support a crop’s sensory qualities. When you want to make a recipe for a new ingredient (crop or heirloom variety), start with what makes the ingredient special, not with what might make the end-product special.
• Genetic diversity and population structure analysis in a large collection of white clover (Trifolium repens L.) germplasm worldwide. Native and introduced populations are genetically differentiated.
• Limited haplotype diversity underlies polygenic trait architecture across 70 years of wheat breeding. Crunch time for UK wheat breeders: continue shuffling within the existing diversity, or expand it?
• Molecular Parallelism Underlies Convergent Highland Adaptation of Maize Landraces. Adaptation to high altitude from the SW US to the Andes was due to wild genes from the Mexican highlands.