- Symbiotic fungus can help plants and detoxify methylmercury.
- Very attractive book on the wild tomatoes of Peru. I wonder if any of them eat heavy metals.
- There’s a new dataset on the world’s terrestrial ecosystems. I’d like to know which one has the most crop wild relative species per unit area. Has anyone done that calculation? They must have.
- Iran sets up a saffron genebank. Could have sworn they already had one.
- The Natural History Museum digs up some old wheat samples, the BBC goes a bit crazy with it.
- Paleolithic diets included plants. Maybe not wheat or saffron though.
- Community seedbanks are all the rage in Odisha.
- Seeds bring UK and South Africa closer together. Seeds in seedbanks. Not community seedbanks, perhaps, but one can hope.
- Can any of the above make agriculture any more nutrition-sensitive? I’d like to think yes. Maybe except for the mercury-eating fungus, though you never know…
Brainfood: Genetic erosion, Ecosystem services, Cereal mixtures, Natural enemies, Soil microbiome double
- Genetic diversity loss in the Anthropocene. Don’t get excited, I don’t think the method translates to cultivated species, but fancy maths says we’ve lost on average 10% of the genetic diversity within species.
- A graphical causal model for resolving species identity effects and biodiversity–ecosystem function correlations. Yeah, but don’t forget that species level diversity is important too. Or rather, diversity of functional traits among species.
- Cereal species mixtures: an ancient practice with potential for climate resilience. A review. Species level diversity in the same farmer’s field is being forgotten, and that’s bad.
- Microbiomes in agroecosystem: Diversity, function and assembly mechanisms. Even soil microbial diversity is important…
- Association analyses of host genetics, root-colonizing microbes, and plant phenotypes under different nitrogen conditions in maize. …but the effects of soil microbial diversity can get quite complicated, and interact with the genetic diversity of crop plants. Which we may or may not have lost an average 10% of.
- Direct and indirect effects of management and landscape on biological pest control and crop pest infestation in apple orchards. Yeah, but species diversity can be bad too.
Brainfood: Wild scarlet runner beans, Wild coffee, Mexican vanilla, Hybrid barley, Zea genus, Wild maize gene, N-fixing xylem microbiota, Drone phenotyping, Wild tomato, Potato breeding, Wild potato, Wheat evaluation, Rice breeding returns
- The genomic signature of wild-to-crop introgression during the domestication of scarlet runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus L.). The wild Mexican genepool is helping to counteract the effects of the domestication bottleneck.
- Genetic variation in wild and cultivated Arabica coffee (Coffea arabica L.): Evolutionary origin, global distribution, and its effect on fungal disease incidence in Southwest Ethiopia. Domesticated disease-resistant cultivars are threatening the genetic integrity of the wild genepool. You win some, you lose some.
- Uncovering haplotype diversity in cultivated Mexican vanilla species. Plenty of evidence of past hybridization events in cultivated vanilla in Mexico. Maybe it can swap stories with scarlet runner bean.
- Six-rowed wild-growing barleys are hybrids of diverse origins. In the case of barley, the wild-cultivated hybrids even got a separate Latin binomial.
- Portrait of a genus: genome sequencing reveals evidence of adaptive variation in Zea. Lots of variation in interesting adaptive traits in the wild relatives of maize. Did they, or will they, make their way into the crop, I wonder?
- An adaptive teosinte mexicana introgression modulates phosphatidylcholine levels and is associated with maize flowering time. This one did.
- A highly conserved core bacterial microbiota with nitrogen-fixation capacity inhabits the xylem sap in maize plants. Its wild relatives are not the only wild organisms maize benefits from.
- Phenomic data-facilitated rust and senescence prediction in maize using machine learning algorithms. Drones and fancy maths can be used to predict and document southern rust infection in maize. Maybe in wild relatives too one day, who knows.
- A Solanum lycopersicoides reference genome facilitates insights into tomato specialized metabolism and immunity. A tomato wild relative has a gene for resistance to bacterial speck disease, so of course they had to sequence its genome.
- Genetic gains in potato breeding as measured by field testing of cultivars released during the last 200 years in the Nordic Region of Europe. Genetic gains for yield (measured in non-target environments) were not that great and contributed about half of productivity gains. Results for other traits were even worse, mainly because of stringent market demands. So no chance of using wild relatives I suppose.
- Genotypic Response and Selection of Potato Germplasm Under Heat Stress. Not so fast…
- Dataset of historic and modern bread and durum wheat cultivar performance under conventional and reduced tillage with full and reduced irrigation. I wonder to what extent wild relatives contributed to the differences.
- Assessing returns to research investments in rice varietal development: Evidence from the Philippines and Bangladesh. Net returns from collaboration in rice breeding between IRRI and national partners are still strong in the Philippines and Bangladesh, but declining, and faster in the former than the latter. Plenty of genes from wild relatives in IRRI lines of course. Maybe there could be more?
Nibbles: Algal genebank, Baking, Distilling, Ft Collins genebank, Community genebanks, Trinidad genebank, Agriculture & climate change, Nigerian coconuts, Organic agriculture
- Saving an algal germplasm collection in the US.
- Saving ancient grains via baking in Israel and distilling in Minnesota.
- Saving seeds (and more) in a famous genebank in Ft Collins, Colorado.
- Saving seeds in community genebanks in Nepal.
- Saving seeds for the community in Trinidad & Tobago.
- Saving agriculture from climate change in Hainan. Someone tell India.
- Saving the Nigerian coconut sector.
- Saving organic agriculture from politicians.
Brainfood: Finger millet diversity, US wheat diversity, Enset diversity, Anglo Saxon diets, Agrobiodiversity index, Rangeland management, Butia groves, Cryotherapy, Bogia Syndrome, Niche models, Merino ancestors
- Scientific Selection – A Century of Increasing Crop Varietal Diversity in US Wheat. Whether you take into account the genetic relationship among varieties or not, breeding has been driving up wheat diversity in American fields. But anyone else think this is a bit of a straw man?
- Novel GBS-Based SNP Markers for Finger Millet and Their Use in Genetic Diversity Analyses. The Zimbabwean and Ethiopian landraces are different and should be crossed more to inject some diversity into improved varieties. You mean like they did for wheat in the US?
- On-Farm Diversity of Enset (Ensete ventricosum (Welw.) Cheesman) Landraces, Use, and the Associated Indigenous Knowledge in Adola Rede District, Guji Zone, Oromia, Ethiopia. No problem with diversity in enset, at least morphologically speaking.
- Food and Power in Early Medieval England: a lack of (isotopic) enrichment. Elite “Anglo-Saxon” males did not have a diet that was consistently higher in meat than anyone else at the time, so there. I wonder if any ever ate enset.
- Assessment of agrobiodiversity in the intensive agriculture: a case study of the Indo-Gangetic Plains of India. Could do with some more legumes.
- Community-based rangeland management in Namibia improves resource governance but not environmental and economic outcomes. Market incentives do not always work the way you think.
- The palm trees choose the places – Popular knowledge associated with the use and conservation of butiá (Butia spp.). No word on market incentives.
- Shoot tip cryotherapy for plant pathogen eradication. Especially good if combined with thermotherapy or chemotherapy. May even work on enset, for all I know.
- The phytoplasma associated with Bogia coconut syndrome in Papua New Guinea is a new phytoplasma in the group of the lethal yellowing syndromes (LYTS) of coconut and other palms. Yeah but will cryotherapy work?
- Implementation of species distribution models in Google Earth Engine. Shhh, or everyone will want to do it, and then where will we be.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Moroccan Beni Ahsen: Is This Endangered Ovine Breed One of the Ancestors of Merino? Maybe? Partly? Does it matter?