- Status and future of seed conservation of threatened plants in the post-2020 era. 21% of threatened plants are conserved in genebanks across 44 countries in Europe and western Asia. Not bad, but not good enough. I wonder how many of those 21% will be of interest to breeders?
- How the international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture can support effective germplasm exchange: four Colombian case studies. The Plant Treaty can really help a country’s genebanks and breeders drive agricultural development, given half a chance.
- Reconciliation or re-colonization? Critical perspectives on seed banking and colonialism. Indigenous communities need to be careful in collaborating with genebanks and breeders.
- Impacts of climate change on fonio millet: seed germination ecology and suitability modelling of an indigenous West African cereal. Climate change will screw up the germination of fonio in some places, so genebanks and breeders better get cracking.
- Euterpe edulis seed recalcitrance: difficult, yes, but not impossible to genebank. Tricky seed storage behaviour need not deter genebankers.
- Accelerated aging caused diversity and specificity loss in the bacterial communities of Brassica napus seedlings. Genebanks should be careful with their seed aging experiments, because they might screw up the seed microbiome.
- Understanding Biotic Constraints to Taro (Colocasia esculenta) Production in the Derived Savanna and Humid Forest Agroecosystems of Nigeria. Genebanks need seed systems though.
Brainfood: Silk Road, Wheat domestication, Peanut domestication, Olive wild relatives, Pearl millet movement, Maori horticulture, Wild meat, Fermentation
- Domesticated: How Cultivated Species Altered Ancient Silk Road Societies. Different stages of adopting and intensifying the use of domesticates (livestock, horses, and later crops) reshaped economies, mobility, and social organization in north-central Asia, ultimately enabling the emergence of the Silk Road. So domesticated species were as active drivers of Eurasian historical development as of prehistory.
- Ancient grains illuminate the mosaic origin of domesticated wheat. Domesticated wheat arose through repeated hybridizations between distinct wild populations carrying complementary non-shattering spike mutations, followed by ongoing gene flow and regional adaptation, making domestication a prolonged and interconnected process. Long before the result got to the Silk Road.
- A single hybrid origin of cultivated peanut. Domestication of the peanut seems to have been easier than that of wheat.
- A synthetic eco-evolutionary proposal for the conservation of wild relatives of the olive tree. If we ever have to re-domesticate the olive, we should make sure these 53 wild populations are conserved.
- Westward expansion of pearl millet agriculture into the Lac de Guiers basin, Senegal, by c. AD 200. I wonder what the Sahelian equivalent of the Silk Road was.
- Horticultural intensification and plant-based diets of 18th century CE Waikato Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. At least some Maori ate predominantly sweet potato and taro during the Traditional Period. Which of course were brought to Aotearoa via the ara moana, which, stretching a point, is the South Pacific equivalent of the Silk Road.
- Increase in wild animal consumption across Central Africa. Yeah, but who needs domesticated species anyway.
- Fermentation as food pedagogy: insights into how teaching fermentation facilitates engagement with the food system. Are fermentation microbes domesticated?
A mycelial thread through human history
A very interesting, wide-ranging review in New Scientist makes the point that fungi were not for ancient humans the marginal resources that their near invisibility in the traditional archaeological record might suggest. In fact, they contributed to diets, health and social organisation, and even fire-making. Here’s a quick summary of what new analytical techniques in archaeology, sometimes linked with ethnography, are revealing, according to the article.
Fire technology (Mesolithic to Neolithic): Polypore fungi, especially Fomes fomentarius, were deliberately harvested, cut, scorched and processed into amadou. This is a felt-like, highly flammable material that people used as portable tinder, forming compact fire-starting kits together with birch bark and pyrite.
Food (Palaeolithic, including Neanderthals): Evidence from dental plaque DNA shows consumption of multiple species (e.g. gray shag, split gill, porcini), suggesting diets were more diverse than has been assumed. Mushrooms may partially explain isotopic signals previously attributed to meat consumption.
Medicine: A Neanderthal individual consumed grasses containing penicillin-producing mould, possibly to treat a dental abscess. Later, Ötzi the Iceman (~3300 BCE) carried amadou, but also birch polypore mushrooms. These may have had medicinal purposes (anti-parasitic, antimicrobial), though they were not found in the stomach, so a new hypothesis suggests they may have been used as fishing floats, based on morphology and experimental replication.
Subsistence and resource extraction: Polypores and puffballs may have been burned to produce smoke to anaesthetise bees, making harvesting honey a lot easier.
Fermentation (Neolithic): Moulds such as Monascus enabled enzymatic conversion of rice starch to sugars, facilitating alcohol production by the so-called “red qu” method. Pottery residues in East Asia show evidence of such brewing some 10,000 years ago, much earlier than originally thought. Fermented beverages were likely used in ritual, mortuary, and communal contexts and may have contributed to social cohesion, identity formation and early political and religious structures.
Brainfood: Animal diversity edition
- Livestock grazing boosts plant diversity in the Greater Serengeti–Mara Ecosystem. Livestock can be good for biodiversity conservation. But can its diversity be conserved too? Let’s see.
- Conservation and Management of Animal Genetic Resources in the Context of African Livestock Production Systems: The Case for In Situ and Ex Situ Conservation. “The multi-stakeholder breeders-researchers-decision-makers approach remains the most robust solution for sound management and preservation of biological units.” What, no farmers and local communities? No, that’s unfair: community-based conservation is discussed. But it doesn’t feel as central to the whole thing as it should be, somehow.
- Genetic Diversity, Adaptation, Wild Introgression, and Coat Color Mutation of Golden Yak. After all, local communities have maintained the golden yak reasonably well.
- Caprine dairy exploitation on the Iranian Plateau from the seventh millennium BC. Not to mention goats in Iran, and for thousands of years…
- Old goats: 3,000 years of genetic connectivity of the domestic goat in Ireland. …and in Ireland, though for not quite as long, admittedly.
- Dogs were widely distributed across western Eurasia during the Palaeolithic. And local communities have been managing dog populations since way before farming even.
- The dispersal of domestic cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 years ago. Also, local communities managed early cats separately in the Levant and Egypt. Much later than dogs, but that’s cats for you.
- A microbiome catalog of Chinese traditional artisanal cheeses provides insights into functional and microbial diversity. And don’t forget to conserve the associated microbiome too. I wonder what golden yak cheese is like.
Brainfood: Rice breeding, Cowpea diversity, Sorghum pangenome, Faba bean genome, Banana wild relative, Cassava breeding, Seed laws, Microbiome double
- Linking genetic gains to food security outcomes: An assessment of IRRI’S rice breeding efforts in the Philippines and Indonesia. Plant breeding is a marathon, not a sprint.
- Scaling up orphan crop research: genebank genetics highlight geographic structure in cultivated cowpea from 10 617 global accessions. Fortunately, there are “opportunity crops” like cowpea, and their genebank collections are being sequenced to help breeders.
- A sorghum pangenome reference improves global crop trait discovery. A pangenome also helps with that marathon, like carb loading.
- Allelic variation at a single locus distinguishes spring and winter faba beans. Even a better reference genome can help.
- Going wild in banana breeding enables Fusarium-resistant hybrids with improved fruit quality. Wild relatives are like those drinks stations.
- Genetic diversity assessment of hydrogen cyanide, total carotenoid content, and dry matter content in biofortified cassava using trait-linked SNP markers. Even next-door breeding programmes can be very different, and thus help each other across the finish line.
- Cross-scale chronological analysis of Southeast Asia’s seed regulations and emerging challenges for seed commons. Seed regulations don’t always help breeders on their marathon.
- Impacts of climate extremes on plant pathogens, microbiomes and plant health. Breeders may need some help from the microbiome on that run.
- Dominance and natural suppression of bacterial plant pathogens across global soils. But the soil microbiome will have troubles of its own.