- Svalbard Vault inspires Cherokee Nation seed saving.
- Genebanks inspire CIMMYT Director General.
- New plant identification app inspires me to get out more.
- Rare Breed Survival Trust inspired by the resilience of some native livestock.
- See if this video doesn’t inspire you to do some pre-breeding.
- Inspiring interview with a breeder of perennial legumes.
Coffee to fight hidden hunger
Micronutrient deficiencies continue to take a toll on global health. Deficiencies of the minerals calcium, iron and zinc impact vital bodily functions including bone strength, oxygen transport and the immune system. At the same time coffee, which is not known for its content of important micronutrients, is “the most consumed food product worldwide”. How can it have taken so long to create fortified coffee?
Scientists in Brazil (where they have an awful lot of coffee) recently announced the results of fortifying ground, roasted coffee with calcium, iron and zinc. Ten trained coffee tasters evaluated a series of mineral salts and chose the two best-tasting salts for each mineral. Despite a slight metallic aftertaste for even the best salts, and a greenish colour for the iron-fortified coffee, the tasters found the fortified coffee acceptable.
Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometry revealed that each fortified brew, based on both Coffea arabica and C. canephora, contained greater amounts of the minerals than unfortified brews. Espresso consistently contained higher concentrations than drip coffee made with either a paper filter or a nylon filter.
The average Brazilian woman would obtain 7.4% of the USDA recommended daily intake of iron from fortified coffee. Men would get 16.7% of the RDI for iron. Equivalent figures for zinc are 4.6% of the RDI for women and 3.3% for men. Calcium is harder to assess, because “acute consumption of caffeine can increase the urinary excretion of this mineral and reduce bone formation”.
Having established that they can fortify coffee with important micronutrient minerals, the researchers now plan to investigate the use of nanoparticles, rather than soluble salts, and to examine “consumer acceptance, stability during storage, and microbiological safety”.
Nibbles: Neolithic, Agroforestry, California dreaming, Not that pawpaw, Droning about salinity, Rocket science
- Beer before bread? Sure, why not.
- Melia is a big hit in Kenya. Must tell the mother-in-law.
- California goes back to the acorn.
- When it’s finished with that, it could try the stuff in this old orchard.
- Unfortunately no pawpaw there. Yet.
- No need to stress out about salinity, California.
- Rucola doesn’t need California.
Nibbles: Grapefruit breeding, Parent navel orange, Meyer lemon, USDA fruit collection, USDA art, Crop diversification, Kiwi genebank, Apple genealogy, Saffron
- Grapefruit has hit bottom, grapefruit breeder says.
- Here’s a solution: a fence.
- What would Frank Meyer say about any of the above?
- Or Todd Kennedy for that matter.
- Botanical art at USDA. Beautiful. And probably a grapefruit in there.
- Gear up for the European Conference on Crop Diversification, 18-21 September 2019 in Budapest, Hungary. Will grapefruit be on the menu?
- Never mind about grapefruit, get a load of this kiwi fruit genebank.
- Nice diagram of apple genealogy. Grapefruit next?
- I bet saffron goes well with grapefruit. Yeah, forced, I know. Sue me.
Brainfood: African rice domestication, Ancient aliens, Durum landraces, Horticultural landraces, Breeding double, Pollinator research, Sacred forests, Traditional Hawaiian ag, Conserving tomatoes, Mapping impacts, Rewilding, Economic growth, Aquaculture impacts, Phenotyping colours
- The complex geography of domestication of the African rice Oryza glaberrima. Domesticated in multiple places, and the formerly putative ancestor population unlikely to be so.
- Prehistoric cereal foods of southeastern Europe: An archaeobotanical exploration. Including Panicum millet as far back as the Bronze Age, interestingly.
- Genetic diversity in Ethiopian Durum Wheat (Triticum turgidum var durum) inferred from phenotypic variations. Some landraces are better than some improved varieties, sometimes, somewhere.
- Editorial: Rediscovering Local Landraces: Shaping Horticulture for the Future. See above.
- Enhancing the rate of genetic gain in public-sector plant breeding programs: lessons from the breeder’s equation. What do they have to say about the genetic diversity term, I hear you ask? “For many species, the primary value of exotic genetic variation is the identification and deployment of rare alleles with large effects that can be introduced into elite breeding programs via a thoughtful implementation of marker-assisted selection…”
- The many‐faced Janus of plant breeding. It’s more than just genetics.
- The need for coordinated transdisciplinary research infrastructures for pollinator conservation and crop pollination resilience. Mine historical data and mobilize the citizenry.
- Human disturbance impacts the integrity of sacred church forests, Ethiopia. Even the small forests are important.
- The potential of indigenous agricultural food production under climate change in Hawaiʻi. They could have fed today’s population, and could still do so.
- Managing plant genetic resources using low and ultra-low temperature storage: a case study of tomato. Nothing is perfect.
- A spatial framework for ex-ante impact assessment of agricultural technologies. I do love a map, but I have to wonder if you can have too much of a good thing.
- Why we should let rewilding be wild and biodiverse. Well, why not?
- Increasing impacts of land use on biodiversity and carbon sequestration driven by population and economic growth. The 2008 financial crisis was good for biodiversity.
- Rapid growth in greenhouse gas emissions from the adoption of industrial-scale aquaculture. Crab ponds are worse than paddy fields for greenhouse gas emissions.
- ColourQuant: a high-throughput technique to extract and quantify colour phenotypes from plant images. Remind me to tell you my story about characterizing the colours of a taro collection in Vanuatu.
- Phenotypic analysis of leaf colours from the USDA, ARS sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas) germplasm collection. Never mind, this story is better.