Microbes

May 8, 2025

Coffee with everything

It might be because we happen to be doing something on the coffee diversity conservation strategy at work, but I have been running into a lot of joe-related material online lately. There’s the bit on Sprudge (apparently, “the world’s most popular coffee publication”) about how coffee diversity needs a Svalbard. Seconded. And, from the same source, also comes a spotlight on Madagascar’s amazing coffee diversity.

Moving to West Africa’s diversity, there’s a Financial Times piece on Coffea stenophylla. And something that seems to be only on LinkedIn (for now) from Dr Steffen Schwarz of Coffee Consulate about how microbe diversity can do wonders with the flavour profile and caffeine content of C. liberica.

Finally, an official submission has gone in for Yemeni coffee to be included in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List. I wonder if all this bodes well for our thing.

May 7, 2025

Brainfood: CC & crop diversity, Dietary Species Richness, CC & banana, European genebank representativeness, Effective Population Size, VarScout, Borlotti bean diversity, Oaxacan? Green Dent, Sorghum mucilage, Gut bacterial diversity

Climate change threatens crop diversity at low latitudes. At low latitudes maybe about a third of the production of 30 major crops shifts outside their climatic niche under 2-3°C global warming, and potential food crop diversity declines on half of global cropland, but potential diversity increases elsewhere. So that’s all good then?
Dietary species richness provides a comparable marker for better nutrition and health across contexts. Dietary species richness (DSR) can be used as a marker for the nutrition and health. If DSR is related to production diversity, I guess that could mean trouble at lower latitudes?
Socio-economic factors constrain climate change adaptation in a tropical export crop. Actually the reduction in suitable area is 60% for banana. And there’s a decline in yield too. Unclear what that will do to DSR.
Plant evolutionary history is largely underrepresented in European seed banks. Would be interesting to apply this specifically to crops. Or even just crop wild relatives.
The Idiot’s Guide to Effective Population Size. Can this be usefully applied to crops? I’d like to see how banana comes out.
Digital Revolution in Farmer Fields: VarScout Unveils Kenya’s Varietal Landscape – The Case of Potato. I’d like to see how banana comes out.
Genetic Diversity and Distinctiveness of Common Beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) Between Landraces and Formal Cultivars Supporting Ex Situ Conservation Policy: The Borlotti Case Study in Northern Italy. It’s difficult, but not impossible, to distinguish — and maintain — landraces of Borlotti beans apart from obsolete and modern cultivars. I wonder if VarScout would help.
Oaxacan Green Dent maize is not from Oaxaca. Watch out for landrace names.
Mucilage produced by aerial roots hosts diazotrophs that provide nitrogen in Sorghum bicolor. Not just maize. And another aspect of diversity to have to worry about.
Cryptic diversity of cellulose-degrading gut bacteria in industrialized humans. And another… What’s the interaction with DSR though?

March 24, 2025March 23, 2025

Brainfood: Ancient maize trifecta, Chinese Neolithic, Ancient silk, Sheep domestication, Ancient focaccia, Indus diversity

The genomic origin of early maize in eastern North America. There were at least 2 eastern dispersals of ancient maize from the US Southwest.
Archaeological findings show the extent of primitive characteristics of maize in South America. At about the same time, semi-domesticated maize also reached deep into South America.
Maize monoculture supported pre-Columbian urbanism in southwestern Amazonia. Including the Llanos de Moxos in Bolivia, where it supported cities.
Millets, dogs, pigs and permanent settlement: productivity transitions in Neolithic northern China. In China, it was millet that supported cities. Well, and pigs.
Species identification of silks by protein mass spectrometry reveals evidence of wild silk use in antiquity. People in those cities had to wear fancy silken clothes, right?
Ancient genomics and the origin, dispersal, and development of domestic sheep. Sheep domestication started in Anatolia, but that wasn’t the end of it, because there was an influx of diversity from the steppes in the Bronze Age. Nice parallel with human diversity. Different to the Chinese millet-pig story though.
Unveiling the culinary tradition of ‘focaccia’ in Late Neolithic Mesopotamia by way of the integration of use-wear, phytolith & organic-residue analyses. You can trace focaccia way back. Goes quite nicely with roast sheep, I suspect.
Different strategies in Indus agriculture: the goals and outcomes of farming choices. Even ancient cultures sometimes felt the need to diversify.

October 21, 2024October 18, 2024

Brainfood: Food systems, Micronutrients, Animal-source foods, Dietary diversity, Opportunity crops, Traditional landscapes, Gastronomic landscapes, Opportunity crops, Biofortification, Fermentation

Global and local perspectives on food security and food systems. Six experts have their say on how to transform food systems, and dietary diversity seems to be a common (though not a universal) theme. Let’s dig a little deeper into that.
Global estimation of dietary micronutrient inadequacies: a modelling analysis. A lot of people could probably do with eating more fruits and vegetables, for example.
Plant-based diets–impacts of consumption of little or no animal-source foods on human health. Some people could probably do with eating more animal-source foods, though. Well, that’s diversity too.
The association between crop diversity and children’s dietary diversity: multi-scalar and cross-national comparisons. In some places, growing more diverse crops is associated with eating more diverse diets; in other places, not so much. Damn you, nuance!
Revive and Thrive: Forgotten Crops for Resilient Food Systems. Fortunately, there are more advantages to growing more diverse crops than its possible positive effect on diet diversity…
Why traditional rural landscapes are still important to our future. …yes indeed there are, especially if they are grown in diverse landscapes.
Nurturing gastronomic landscapes for biosphere stewardship. The hallowed craft of cooking can help realize those advantages.
NUS so fast: the social and ecological implications of a rapidly developing indigenous food economy in the Cape Town area. However, growing more diverse crops can have downsides, celebrity chefs etc. notwithstanding.
Assessing realized genetic gains in biofortified cassava breeding for over a decade: Enhanced nutritional value and agronomic performance. Breeding crops for higher nutritional value comes at a yield price. Which presumably, in some places, for some people, may be worth paying, give all the uncertainties above?
The future is fermented: Microbial biodiversity of fermented foods is a critical resource for food innovation and human health. Or, we could all ferment more. And maybe get drunk.

October 17, 2024

Nibbles: IUCN report, Land Institute, Climate smart beer, BioLeft seeds, Cryo coral

Big IUCN report says that biodiversity and agriculture are in conflict, they don’t really need to be, but it’s really complicated for them not to be. So that’s us all told.
If only annual crops were perennial, for example, eh?
If only we incorporated more sustainable agriculture in education, for example, eh? Apart from anything else we could still have beer. No word on the role of perennial barley though.
If only improved seeds were open source, for example, eh?
If only we could cryopreserve coral, for example, eh? Wait, what?