Yoruba twins due to yams?
Garlic; cooking and diversity
How to cook garlic. Oh, and also how to identify duplicates in garlic germplasm collections by DNA fingerprinting.
Capsicum on show
“A Pepper for Every Pot†is on at the U.S. Botanic Gardens in Washington, D.C.
Herbal remedies
Aromatic agrobiodiversity was in the news and the peer-reviewed literature today. Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) got a good write-up in ScienceDaily. It turns out that one of chemicals found in its spiky leaves — carnosic acid — can protect the brain from free radicals, but is only activated by the damage caused by these compounds. Otherwise it just sits there doing nothing, which is what you want in a drug. Anyway, there are lots of different varieties of rosemary, and different levels of carnosic acid among them. There are also wild populations in the Mediterranean, as of other herbs as well, and people who make a living harvesting them from the garrigue. That can sometimes be overdone, resulting in damage to the plants, and to the environment, due to increased soil erosion when it rains. So a study from Spain just published in the journal Catena is welcome. It quantified how much harvesting of various aromatic shrubs (lavender, oregano, sage and santolina) you can do before the soil starts to suffer. The recommendation is to leave 50% of the plant biomass in the field.
What’s your poison?
One of the more interesting — and controversial — uses of biodiversity, both wild and agricultural, is to cause altered states of consciousness. As luck would have it, there were three things sort of on this topic which caught my eye today.
First, a short article from the New Scientist appeared in my feed reader about how the UN Environment Programme has singled out for conservation a chunk of desert in Chihuahua, northern Mexico. The importance of this area comes from the fact that it is the home of the peyote cactus, source of the hallucinogenic alkaloid mescaline, and objective of an annual pilgrimage by the Huichol people.
Then there was a EurekAlert piece about funding for an attempt to breed new varieties of the opium poppy and of cannabis that could be used to produce useful bioproducts, but not illicit drugs. This is apparently all going to take place in an ultra-secure Canadian mine shaft. Maybe they could then store the resulting seed in another famous hole in the ground?
And finally, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has a cool interactive map where you can find out about famous British brewers.
Mescaline, dope and beer. In the words of Major T.J. “King” Kong, “Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that agrobiodiversity.” Well, he almost said that.