- Exploring the genetic and adaptive diversity of a pan-Mediterranean crop wild relative: narrow-leafed lupin. W-E migration.
- From lesser-known to super vegetables: the growing profile of African traditional leafy vegetables in promoting food security and wellness. I’m sold.
- Home-grown school feeding: promoting local production systems diversification through nutrition sensitive agriculture. Any traditional leafy greens, though?
- Citrus genebank collections: international collaboration opportunities between the US and Russia. Very complementary.
- Adapting clonally propagated crops to climatic changes: a global approach for taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott). The need for seed.
- High-temperature drying of seeds of wild Oryza species intended for long-term storage. The need for drying seeds at 45°C.
- Productivity, biodiversity, and pathogens influence the global hunter-gatherer population density. Come the zombie apocalypse, head for subtropical and temperate forest biomes.
- Genomics of the origin and evolution of Citrus. It all started when the SE foothills of the Himalayas got a bit dryer in the Miocene… But there’s only one genus (well, plus Poncirus), with 10 species. Oh and pummelos are really important.
- Sheep herding systems and animal genetic resource management in the Central Plateau region of Burkina Faso. The best strategy overall would be for rural breeders to specialize in maintaining purebreds and urban breeders, closer to markets, fattened F1 crossbreds. But that’s easier said than done.
- Access to genes: linkages between genebanks and farmers’ seed systems. You can do it in half a dozen different ways, but there are challenges with scale, sustainability and legal frameworks.
Nibbles: Ruby chocolate, Wild Cicer, Lost rices, Breeding beans, Pawpaw, Pink pineapple, Indigenous livestock, Aquaculture, Coffee Atlas, Egyptian beer, Tequila shortage, Crop diversity
Nibbles: Forages info, Seed bag, Black rust, Brazilian fruits, Mutant Millets, Biotech conference, Nutrition, RTBFoods
- The latest tropical forages newsletter.
- The Edens Bluff seed bag for your pleasure. You’re welcome.
- SciDev.net thinks Yemen is in North Africa. Anyway, be afraid.
- Umbu and licuri are helping Brazilian farmers. Yeah, I don’t know what they are either. IFAD wants you to google them, I guess.
- The Mutant Millet project is a name to conjure with.
- As is the VIII International Scientific and Practical Conference on Biotechnology as an Instrument for Plant Biodiversity Conservation (physiological, biochemical, embryological, genetic and legal aspects).
- Four ways nutrition is good for development. Only four?
- What gets a new tuber accepted? Now there’s a project to find out. Only now?
Brainfood: MSB value, Wild rice genomes, Media coverage, Ancient turkeys, Diverse covers, ABS & sequences, Red listing, Old crops, Wild pollinators, Rice breeding, Farm & dietary diversity, Forages positives, Kurdish sheep
- The conservation value of germplasm stored at the Millennium Seed Bank, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK. 10% of about 40,000 taxa, >8% of collections, are either extinct, rare or vulnerable at global and/or national level; 20% of taxa, representing 13% collections, are endemic at the country or territory scale. And the cost, though?
- Genomes of 13 domesticated and wild rice relatives highlight genetic conservation, turnover and innovation across the genus Oryza. Lots of things for breeders to play around with. Australians especially pleased.
- Our House Is Burning: Discrepancy in Climate Change vs. Biodiversity Coverage in the Media as Compared to Scientific Literature. Biodiversity conservation community really bad at getting the message out.
- Diversity of management strategies in Mesoamerican turkeys: archaeological, isotopic and genetic evidence. Separate domestications in Mesoamerica and SW USA; two types in former, one fed crops and the other, more flamboyant type, left to roam; neither eaten.
- Functional traits in cover crop mixtures: Biological nitrogen fixation and multifunctionality. Design mixtures with complementary plant traits for maximum on-farm benefit.
- Plant genetic resources for food and agriculture: opportunities and challenges emerging from the science and information technology revolution. The future is Norway.
- Quantifying progress toward a conservation assessment for all plants. A quarter done.
- The earliest occurrence of a newly described domesticate in Eastern North America: Adena/Hopewell communities and agricultural innovation. Erect knotweed used to be a crop, a mainstay of the Eastern Agricultural Complex. Now it’s a weed. Can the same be said of other plants? Well, maybe.
- Conserving honey bees does not help wildlife. Wild bees, that is.
- Breeding implications of drought stress under future climate for upland rice in Brazil. Wide adaptation of upland rice in Brazil is not going to cut it.
- Farm production diversity and dietary quality: linkages and measurement issues. Cash is often better than production diversity at predicting dietary diversity.
- Tropical forage legumes for environmental benefits: An overview. Ruminant livestock production need not be bad for the environment. Useful list of research needs to make sure.
- Complete mitogenomes from Kurdistani sheep: abundant centromeric nuclear copies representing diverse ancestors. There are lots of bits of mitochondrial DNA near the centromeres of all chromosomes bar the Y. Is that a problem for phylogenies?
Nibbles: African pollinators, Wild wheat, Brazilian meet, Bamboo meet, Old seeds, Rice diversity, 5282, Frozen grapes
- Call for proposals on African pollinator informatics.
- The Linnean Society puts “Wheat Taxonomy: the legacy of John Percival” online. Heroes all.
- The Brazilian genetic resources congress gets a Facebook page.
- There’s also a bamboo and rattan congress coming up.
- A time capsule is dug up in Canada, and it’s got seeds!
- Seeking rice SNPs? Use snp-seek.
- What links the Dutch Easy India Company with a measles outbreak in the US? The answer will probably not surprise you.
- We really need some new wine grape cultivars. I mean REALLY new.