Medicinal plants

November 19, 2014November 19, 2014

Moroccan medicinal mint tea

photo (34)

That’s me on the right in Rabat last week, having a post-prandial drink with Dr Ahmed Amri, head of the ICARDA genebank. I post the photo (taken by my colleague Charlotte Lusty) by way of explanation for the lack of blogging lately, and also as an excuse to link to the beta version of Kew’s Medicinal Plant Names Service, which I have just become aware of. You see that bit of greenery on the tea tray? It’s a plant that’s sometimes added to mint tea in Morocco during the winter. It’s called “absinthe” there. If you want to know the Latin name, you can look it up here.

November 16, 2014November 23, 2014

Nibbles: Chocolate, MAS, Cash crops, Medicinal plants, Rice domestication, Cat genome, Banana research, Artichoke history, Root vegetables, Diabetes data, eMonocot, Paris herbarium, Appleseed, Seed saving, Potato safety duplication, Seed atlas, Botanical Jurassic Park, Mapping urban fruit, Midwest road trip, Iraqi marshes, World Digital Library, World Parks Congress, Plant demography

Ok here goes, there’s a week’s work of Nibbles we’ve got to catch up on.
World running out of chocolate! Tell that to Cologne.
Yeah well I prefer tea to cocoa.
Greenpeace: “Smart breeding” will save us, not GMOs. Breeders: All breeding is smart.
Guess the world’s biggest cash crop. Yeah, that one.
Alas, it’s not included in the recent strategy for conserving medicinal plants. Not that it would need conserving.
The domestication of the world’s biggest crop, period. Deconstructed. And if you want to drill down.
And of the world’s biggest fruit.
And of the world’s biggest pet.
And of the world’s most difficult to eat vegetable.
Root “vegetables” made simple. Because winter.
And why you must eat your veggies, including the difficult ones.
Videos on Kew’s monocot database and on the renovation of another famous herbarium.
The real Johnny Appleseed.
But you too can save seeds, just like Johnny.
But don’t forget to safety duplicate, like CIP has done, at Embrapa.
And this shows you what those seeds can look like.
You don’t necessarily need seeds to save plants, though.
Mapping fallen fruit. Because we can.
Road trip!
Boat trip!
Selected Techniques in the Art of Agriculture. From French to Turkish to Arabic. One of many nifty agriculture-related resources in the World Digital Library.
Oh yeah, the IUCN World Parks Congress has been on and its all over the intertubes. Including with neat visualizations, natch.
How many of the species in the COMPADRE database of plant demography information are in protected areas? How many are crop wild relatives? I need an intern.

November 3, 2014November 3, 2014

Brainfood: Enset & cattle, Evolution Canyon, Indian spices, Bohemian fruit rhapsody, ILRI forage genebank, Wild sunflower, Agroecology, Holistic hazelnuts, Culture & conservation, Salty broomcorn, Fancy mapping, German cherries, Ethiopian barley nutrients

Sidama Agro-Pastoralism and Ethnobiological Classification of its Primary Plant, Enset (Ensete ventricosum). The Sidama feed the high-protein parts of enset to cattle and then get their protein from milk. Seems a roundabout way of going about things but I guess they know best.
Evolution of wild barley at “Evolution Canyon”: adaptation, speciation, pre-agricultural collection, and barley improvement. One-stop shop for researching evolution of a crop wild relative.
Spices and Condiments: Status of Genetic Resources and Setting Priorities for Introduction in India. National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources is on the job, collecting at home and acquiring from genebanks abroad.
Inventory and conservation of fruit tree landraces as cultural heritage of Bohemian Forest (Czech Republic), indicators for former settlements of ethnic minorities. That would mean Germans. No word on whether the database has been cross-checked with that of BLE-IBV. Interested in the topic of European landraces in general? Try this from Bioversity.
Forage Diversity: An Essential Resource to Support Forage Development. ILRI’s genebank deconstructed.
Wild Sunflower Species as a Genetic Resource for Resistance to Sunflower Broomrape (Orobanche cumana Wallr.). Pretty much all the perennial species have resistance, and many of the annuals. Thank goodness for the USDA collection, eh?
Agroecological Research: Conforming — or Transforming the Dominant Agro-Food Regime? Bit of both? Is that such a bad thing?
A multidisciplinary approach to enhance the conservation and use of hazelnut Corylus avellana L. genetic resources. Holistic, even.
The Cooked is the Kept: Factors Shaping the Maintenance of Agro-biodiversity in the Andes. Keep your culture, keep your crop diversity.
Response of broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) genotypes from semi arid regions of China to salt stress. 39 out of a core collection of 195. Result!
Vital Signs: Integrating Data To Visualize the Human, Agriculture, and Nature Nexus. Sounds promising enough an effort to bring together livelihoods, production and environmental data, but when you go to the website (for Tanzania in this case), all you get is a bunch of admittedly very pretty pdf maps.
Phenotypic and genotypic characterization in the collection of sour and duke cherries (Prunus cerasus and ×P. ×gondouini) of the Fruit Genebank in Dresden-Pillnitz, Germany. …give different results. If I had a dollar…
Genome-wide association mapping of zinc and iron concentration in barley landraces from Ethiopia and Eritrea. There are QTLs. Now what?

November 2, 2014November 2, 2014

Nibbles: Biological collections, ICT & food security, Pisco battles, Rabbit stew, Afghan silk, ILRI @40, Silicon Valley & livestock, Trade & deforestation, Nexus shmexus, Landscape analyzed, Native potatoes, Botanical herb garden, Plant crime, Cornbread & other indigenous foods, Climate smart ag, Caterpillar fungus, Reindeer poop virus, Rice breeder vid

Biological collections under pressure.
And mobile phones probably wont help. Much.
Chilean pisco? Really?
The end of cooking?
Sericulture on the Silk Road.
ILRI is 40, did we say? Not sure what they do on sericulture. No doubt somebody there will tell us. They’re social networking machines over there.
Watch out, ILRI, Silicon Valley is coming for ya.
One of the reasons why we need livestock research: deforestation.
I like any article with the word nexus in the title.
The landscape approach meta-analyzed to within an inch of its life. Bottom line: it’s the women, stupid!
The power of the people’s potatoes.
A secret herb garden revealed. I hope they install CCTV.
Kana’tarokhónwe. Yep, clickbait, but worth it, trust me. And then scale the thing up.
How to do climate-smart agriculture in Latin America and the Caribbean, country by country.
Oh no, yet another article on that Himalayan Viagra caterpillar fungus thingy.
Boffins resurrect 700-year-old fungus from reindeer crap.
Indian rice breeders talk about their cool new basmati.

October 30, 2014October 30, 2014

Nibbles: Cannabis, Brachiaria, Grasslands, Oryza, Taxonomy resources, Artocarpus, Quercus, Zea, MAS, GBIF

“Something researchers are looking at is which cultivars, or strains, of hemp are best for the various uses — fiber, oil, nutrition, etc.” Love that etc.
Speaking about grass: Brachiaria goes home, to wild acclaim.
Did someone say wild? Wild grass needs help!
Rice is a grass. Oh my yes.
How to keep up to date with taxonomic research online.
Pacific Regional Breadfruit Initiative gets an award.
You can also make flour from acorns.
And maize: what’s a grit?
Greenpeace touts MAS.
Next thing you know they’ll be singing the praises of Big Data. Yeah, maybe not.