- Perennial Glycine: A new source of genetic diversity for soybean improvement. The perennial wild species are genetically and geographically distant from the crop, but at least one can be crossed, with some difficulty, and some potentially useful genes have been enticed to make their way into the cultivated genome. To no great effect, but it’s early days yet.
- Genetic resources collections of leafy vegetables (lettuce, spinach, chicory, artichoke, asparagus, lamb’s lettuce, rhubarb and rocket salad): composition and gaps. You can just read the collecting priorities for each genepool, or analyze the data yourself.
- Screening the banana biodiversity for drought tolerance: can an in vitro growth model and proteomics be used as a tool to discover tolerant varieties and understand homeostasis? Maybe.
- Development of yield and some photosynthetic characteristics during 82 years of genetic improvement of soybean genotypes in northeast China. Yield doubled, but at the cost of water use efficiency. Maybe those perennials could help?
- An assessment of the genetic integrity of ex situ germplasm collections of three endangered species of Coffea from Madagascar: implications for the management of field germplasm collections. For 3 wild species, there’s lots of genetic diversity in field genebanks, but also lots of crossing with other species.
- Diversity of culturable bacteria and occurrence of phytopathogenic species in bean seeds (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) preserved in a germplasm bank. “…the fact that potentially phytopathogenic bacteria have been preserved in a genebank should emphasize the importance of rigorous sanitary controls for plant genetic resources.” You think?
Nibbles: Aspergillus domestication, Aurochs resynthesis, Drought resistance, Protected areas, Ford Denison, Ancient diets
- The National Fungus of Japan explains itself.
- The aurochs recreated in fact and fiction. And more.
- Yes, that’s what we need to make good on all those GM drought-resistance promises: a new model system. And now for something a little more serious.
- Some protected areas don’t work terribly well. Here comes the science.
- Darwinian Agriculture explained by the man himself.
- Ancient diets deduced from teeth crap and crap crap.
Nibbles: Wild goat, Heirlooms, Queen’s garden, Baobabs, Bison demise, Friendly yeast, Peruvian potatoes, Saline rice
- Old goat redux.
- A really nothing piece in the Washington Post about heirlooms.
- This is more like it: take home the Queen’s heirlooms. Well, almost.
- Here’s a baobab truly worthy of a factsheet.
- It was international trade that wiped out the bison.
- Fundamentals of On-Farm Plant Breeding Course: The Video.
- Another use for yeast.
- The Parque de la Papa highlighted. But doesn’t say seeds are even going to Svalbard.
- Salinity tolerance in rice: in Goa, and at IRRI.
Brainfood: Synthetic wheat, Pisum, Maize products, Seed predation, Cajanus, Tripsacum, Horse domestication, Cicer genomics, Cereal vulnerability, Allotments, Conservation units, Chilie diversity, Endophytes
- Sources of resistance in primary synthetic hexaploid wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) to insect pests: Hessian fly, Russian wheat aphid and Sunn pest in the fertile crescent. Domestication do-over continues to show promise. Closest thing to a jetpack?
- Evaluation of seed yield and seed yield components in red–yellow (Pisum fulvum) and Ethiopian (Pisum abyssinicum) peas. Weird pea species show promise in Serbia, of all places.
- Consumer preferences for maize products in urban Kenya. Most still like it white. Not much promise there.
- Bush pig (Potamochoerus porcus) seed predation of bush mango (Irvingia gabonensis) and other plant species in Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s pretty unpromising for seeds, especially right under the tree.
- Phenotypic diversity in Cajanus species and identification of promising sources for agronomic traits and seed protein content. 14 accessions of 8 seem promising (out of a total of 198 accessions of 18 species from the ICRISAT collection).
- Genetic relations among Tripsacum species revealed by genomic variation. They might be promising.
- Reconstructing the origin and spread of horse domestication in the Eurasian steppe. Wild Equus ferus moves out of eastern Eurasian steppe 160 kya, shows promise, gets domesticated in the western part, but continues to introgress with local wild horses as it moves out from there.
- Large-scale development of cost-effective SNP marker assays for diversity assessment and genetic mapping in chickpea and comparative mapping in legumes. What can I tell you. It’s large-scale. It’s cost effective. It’s promising. I’m still waiting for my jetpack.
- The socioeconomics of food crop production and climate change vulnerability: a global scale quantitative analysis of how grain crops are sensitive to drought. It’s the middle income countries that are especially vulnerable, and thus where all that promise needs to come good.
- Deskilling, agrodiversity, and the seed trade: a view from contemporary British allotments. Please promise to keep open-pollinated heirlooms out of the marketplace.
- Harnessing genomics for delineating conservation units. But you need to combine information from neutral and adaptive markers in fancy ways to fulfill the promise.
- Why are not all chilies hot? A trade-off limits pungency. It’s all about how much water is available.
- Endophytic Insect-Parasitic Fungi Translocate Nitrogen Directly from Insects to Plants. Suppose we better promise to conserve these things too then. And here’s the slightly longer short version.
Brainfood: Barcoding, DArT for beans, SNOPs for Cacao, Aquaculture impacts, Cassava GS, Cereals in genebanks, Symbiosis
- A critical review on the utility of DNA barcoding in biodiversity conservation. Not bad, but not by itself.
- A whole genome DArT assay to assess germplasm collection diversity in common beans. It works, and can distinguish Andean from Mesoamerican accessions.
- Optimization of a SNP assay for genotyping Theobroma cacao under field conditions. It works, and is being used in Ghana.
- A Global Assessment of Salmon Aquaculture Impacts on Wild Salmonids. Meta-analysis shows farming salmon and trout in an area has in general been bad for their wild relatives there.
- Genome-wide selection in cassava. High correlations between SNPs and several phenotypic traits of interest to breeders mean that selection time could be cut by half. Could.
- Cereal landraces genetic resources in worldwide GeneBanks. A review. We don’t have enough data. On so many different levels.
- Coevolutionary genetic variation in the legume-rhizobium transcriptome. Wait, does this mean we should be conserving Rhizobium too?