- How many different kinds of bread do you think there are ancient Greek words for?
- “As phenomenally important as the USDA [seed banks] and the Svalbard [Global Seed Vault] are, they are repositories for biodiversity, not places we can call up to get seeds to plant five acres of corn.”
- As above, but in India.
- As above, but from a seed company.
- Barbara Schaal on domestication. With video goodness.
- A Food System Dashboard to rule them all: describe, diagnose, decide. Not there yet, but almost. It says here.
Nibbles: Risks & solutions edition
- How nature-related risks matter to business.
- Exhibit A: beer.
- Exhibit B: wine and wine.
- Looking at it the other way, some infographics to sum up the impact of food production on the environment.
- And then there are nature-based solutions…
- Sometimes companies do good just for the hell of it: e.g. ohia conservation in Hawaii.
- And sometimes it just takes family.
- “Despite the challenges of climate change and state fragility in parts of Africa, the continent has the potential to not only achieve food and nutrition security, but to leverage the food sector for its overall development.”
- Some tips on how to communicate all the above.
Nibbles: Purple, Emirati bees, MJ Bale, Solanum jamesii, Olive genebank, Victoria genebank, Kampot pepper
- Murex from Meninx.
- Breeding a better bee.
- Menswear retailer to dabble in sustainable livestock.
- There was a fourth sister.
- A world olive collection in Spain.
- “If we can assume the fire pattern is as bad as the stuff we see on TV, I reckon at this very moment there is a goodly sized handful of species that are technically extinct right now.” At least in the wild.
- Cambodia’s world-beating peppercorn makes a post-post-colonial comeback.
Brainfood: Bean diversity treble, Edited tomatoes, Breeding strategies, Pseudocereals, American lost crops, Genotyping collections, Apple diversity, Rice domestication, Cotton domestication, Wheat & gluten, Rubus phylogeny, Cassava brown streak, Prices & migration, Edible caterpillars
- Resequencing of 683 common bean genotypes identifies yield component trait associations across a north–south cline. There’s a fairly straightforward way to select for larger beans as a key component of yield.
- Is the USDA core collection of common bean representative of genetic diversity of the species, as assessed by SNP diversity? Not as much as it could be.
- Diversity, use and production of farmers’ varieties of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L., Fabaceae) in southwestern and northeastern Ethiopia. There are more varieties per household in places where the overall number of varieties per community was lower.
- Rapid customization of Solanaceae fruit crops for urban agriculture. Gene editing for shorter tomatoes.
- The home field advantage of modern plant breeding. Public breeding programs should go for specialist varieties that perform reliably in narrow environments.
- Thinking Outside of the Cereal Box: Breeding Underutilized (Pseudo)Cereals for Improved Human Nutrition. The next quinoa awaits its 15 minutes.
- Experimental Cultivation of Eastern North America’s Lost Crops: Insights into Agricultural Practice and Yield Potential. There’s life in the old crops yet. And that’s before gene editing.
- Time for a paradigm shift in the use of plant genetic resources. Genotype everything.
- Using whole-genome SNP data to reconstruct a large multi-generation pedigree in apple germplasm. 3 early modern cultivars had a disproportionate impact on modern apples.
- Machine Learning Reveals Spatiotemporal Genome Evolution in Asian Rice Domestication. The indica and japonica sub-species have exchanged a lot of genetic material at different times, and you get different answers to the question of domestication depending on which bits you look at.
- Genetic Analysis of the Transition from Wild to Domesticated Cotton (G. hirsutum L.). There are fibre quality genes in the subgenome from the parent with unspinnable fibre. Go figure.
- A Comparative Study of Modern and Heirloom Wheat on Indicators of Gastrointestinal Health. Not much difference.
- Target Capture Sequencing Unravels Rubus Evolution. The taxonomy needs work. You don’t say.
- Expansion of the cassava brown streak pandemic in Uganda revealed by annual field survey data for 2004 to 2017. The history of a disease outbreak in excruciating detail.
- Crop prices and the individual decision to migrate. Decrease in the price of coffee in Vietnam (but not rice, which is mainly used for household consumption rather than export) resulted in increased chance of migration, but only for individuals of lower education.
- The contribution of ‘chitoumou’, the edible caterpillar Cirina butyrospermi, to the food security of smallholder farmers in southwestern Burkina Faso. It’s significant, but only during the caterpillar season. I guess they don’t keep. I spot an opportunity. Yeah, you guessed it, gene editing.
Nibbles: USDA maize genebank, Apple breeding, Seed conservation, Soil map, Scoring supermarkets, DNA barcoding, Stone Age Hypoxis, Hybrid wine, Lost crops, Boswellia, Leucokaso, Species mixtures
- Nice student video on the genebank and breeding programmes at Iowa State.
- Speaking of breeding programmes and videos, here’s Sean Myles on his work on apples in Canada.
- Seed conservation legend Richard Ellis on what climate change is doing to seed quality.
- An amazing new global soil properties map is open for business.
- Scoring supermarkets for the human suffering they represent.
- The future of DNA barcoding…is here.
- Cotton 101.
- Strong evidence of Middle Stone Age tuber cooking in southern Africa.
- French wine growers dip a cautious toe into the grapewine interspecific genepool.
- Yields of mixtures of now “lost” native American crops comparable to those of maize.
- The canonical yearly frankincense story in honour of Epiphany.
- Biblical white olive makes a comeback in Italy.
- Useful update of mixture studies.