- Beer with shrooms. Well, not quite, but one can hope.
- No more corn detasseling? Say it ain’t so.
- “Oman to Plant 100,000 Coconut Trees in Dhofar.” That’s in the south of the country, a fascinating area. And one asks, as ever: What varieties, and what’s going to happen to the local material?
- Be like the bamboo, man.
- From DAD-Net, news of a mini-conference on the camel. And an article on same.
- The struggle for forest grazing rights in India.
- Dump blueberries, eat local berries, Brits told. Pavlovsk still in trouble.
Nibbles: Protected area management, Yam domestication, Ottoman cooking, Measuring rice drought tolerance, Proteomics, Lupinus, Areca, Jethobudho, Nutrition megaprogramme, Soil bacteria
- Concentrating management practices on conserving a particular plant species may have bad consequences for other bits of biodiversity. Lessons for crops wild relatives?
- Benin’s farmers ennoble wild yams.
- A Lebanese lunch is an educational experience. Right.
- Paddyomics video. Nothing to do with the Irish. It’s about how IRRI is automating, er, everything about its phenotyping.
- Tamarind’s environmental niche is, in fact, er, niches?
- Different wheat genomes generate distinct protein profiles.
- Phylogenetic relationships of a new Mediterranean lupin.
- Betel nut chewing endangers coral. Kinda. Traditional and all that, but an unpleasant habit nonetheless.
- Our friend Bhuwon and others tell the story of the participatory improvement and formal release of Jethobudho rice landrace in Nepal.
- CGIAR elicits comment on the Agriculture for Improved Nutrition and Health megaprogramme. Until August 1.
- Bacterial diversity boosts maize yields.
Diversity in a fungal symbiont affects rice performance
Nigel Chaffey over at Annals of Botany is really extraordinarily good at finding — and writing about — extraordinarily interesting plant stuff. Plus his Plant Cuttings is free. That’s why I always link to him, either in Nibbles or as a post. His latest offering is particularly agrobiodiversity-laden, with pieces on the results of the CGIAR Science Forum, the bad behaviour of some pollinators, rice, engineering a better photosynthesis, and Newton’s apple tree in space. I could have written a post about any of these, really, but why bother when Prof. Chaffey has done such a great job already?
Having said that, though, I still can’t resist making a particular mention of work by Caroline Angelard and others at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Their paper in Current Biology investigates the symbiotic interaction between an arbusculo-mycorrhizal fungus (AMF) and rice. These fungi consist of a common cytoplasm inhabited by populations of genetically different nuclei. When spores form, different ones end up with different nucleotype complements. Which can get mixed up again through genetic exchange between spores. So what? Well, because all this genetic toing and froing (or, technically, segregation) has only recently been discovered, “no attempts have been made to test whether this affects the symbiosis with plants.” Until now. And it turns out that it does. Segregation “can enhance the growth of rice up to five times, even though neither parental nor crossed AMF lines induced a positive growth response.”
So here’s another level of agricultural diversity to worry about. And what’s the betting that there is genetic diversity in rice as to its response to the genetic diversity of its symbiotic fungi?
Nibbles: Wetlands, Cucurbit phylogeny, Herbology, Malnutrition, Fungi, India, Livestock, Ug99, Madagascar, Beer
- Conserving dambos for livelihoods in southern Africa. How many CWRs are found in such wetland habitats around the world, I wonder.
- Cucumis not out of Africa.
- Exploring “the connection between traditional knowledge of herbs, edible and medicinal plants and media networked culture.” And why not.
- PBS video on malnutrition.
- Fungal exhibition at RBG Edinburgh.
- Indian Council on Agricultural Research framing guidelines for private-public partnerships in seed sector. That’ll stop the GM seed pirates.
- Conserve African humpless cattle! They’re needed for breeding.
- UG99 — and crop wild relatives — in the news. The proper news. The one people pay attention to.
- Vanilla lovers better start stocking up.
- Kenyan farmers earning money selling sorghum to brewers. What’s not to like.
The human body as microbial ecosystem
It’s probably best not to dig too deeply or dwell too long on the details of fecal transplantation, as Carl Zimmer does in an otherwise fascinating NY Times piece, but it does serve to remind us of the extent to which we depend on the incredible diversity of microbes, and not just for things like nitrogen fixation and fermentation.