Category: Microbes

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Brainfood: Genomics for conservation and use edition

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Brainfood: Why measure genetic diversity?

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Nibbles: Green seeds, Yam bean, Aussie wild tomato, Einkorn trial, US sorghum, Ethiopian forages tricot, Cuisine diversity, Apple catalogue, Hittite crash, Black Death

  1. Let’s say we wanted to transition to a more local and low-input production system in Europe. What seeds would we need and where would we get them from? The Greens/EFA in the European Parliament have some ideas.
  2. IITA is pushing the yam bean in Nigeria. Europe next?
  3. More on that new Australian wild tomato from a couple of years back. With audio goodness.
  4. The largest ever einkorn variety comparison trial makes the German news. Well, makes a press release anyway. Yam bean next?
  5. Another continent, another ancient grain: sorghum in the US. Yam bean next?
  6. The Ethiopia Grass project aims to improve livestock production, food crop yields AND soil quality. The trifecta!
  7. Nice infographics displaying dodgy data on the most common ingredients in different cuisines. Yam bean and einkorn nowhere to be seen.
  8. Cool community-created online catalogue of British apples. Looking forward to the yam bean one.
  9. It was drought that did for the Hittites, not lack of yam beans. Sea Peoples unavailable for comment.
  10. It was Yersinia pestis from Issyk-Kul that nearly did for Europe in the Middle Ages. Yes, you can study the genetic diversity of ancient deadly bugs and well as that of crops like yam bean and einkorn.
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Nibbles: Mugumu, Gates, Fixation, OSA, USDA, Panicum, Digitaria, Britgrub, Wheat, ICRISAT, Svalbard

  1. Blog post on the importance of the mugumu tree in Kikuyu culture.
  2. Alas, no sign of mugumu trees on the Kenyan farm visited by Bill Gates recently. But there were chickens, drought-tolerant maize and mobile phones…
  3. …and there may soon be crops engineered for nitrogen fixation too, if his foundation’s project with the University of Cambridge comes through.
  4. Speaking of maize, here’s a nice illustrated story of how the Organic Seed Alliance is helping farmers grow their own tortilla corn in the Pacific Northwest.
  5. To generalize and contextualize the above, read this USDA e-book on plant collections and climate change.
  6. Dr Giedre Motuzaite Matuzeviciute just got a grant to study broomcorn millet domestication and dispersal in Central Asia. There may be lessons for present-day adaptation to climate change, says the blurb.
  7. There are probably lessons about adaptation to climate change also to be had from Kew’s work on fonio and other traditional crops in Guinea.
  8. I wonder if Kew boffins are also working on bere, perry and other endangered British foods though.
  9. It’s always nice to see someone first learn about genebanks, and how they can help with the whole climate change thing.
  10. Meanwhile, in India, ICRISAT gets a stamp, which however doesn’t look very much like India or ICRISAT to me. Plenty of broomcorn millet in its genebank, by the way.
  11. Plenty of seeds from the ICRISAT genebank in Svalbard, as Asmund Asdal will no doubt point out on 10 February.
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Nibbles: Fancy fungus, Fancy CWR book, Fancy dataset, Fancy food, Fancy wheat collection, Fancy diet, Fancy seeds, Fancy agriculture

  1. Symbiotic fungus can help plants and detoxify methylmercury.
  2. Very attractive book on the wild tomatoes of Peru. I wonder if any of them eat heavy metals.
  3. 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.
  4. Iran sets up a saffron genebank. Could have sworn they already had one.
  5. The Natural History Museum digs up some old wheat samples, the BBC goes a bit crazy with it.
  6. Paleolithic diets included plants. Maybe not wheat or saffron though.
  7. Community seedbanks are all the rage in Odisha.
  8. Seeds bring UK and South Africa closer together. Seeds in seedbanks. Not community seedbanks, perhaps, but one can hope.
  9. 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…