- Design guru talks botany. Latest plant getting the treatment is the Hawaiian Cotton Tree. Which, despite its name, really is a (remote) cotton wild relative.
- What has Next Generation Sequencing ever done for me? And what you should know about how it works.
- And here’s an example of it at work: different cultivated cotton species have behaved differently, genetically speaking.
- That used ancient DNA, this one didn’t, but I guess a future one on chiles might. LATER: Ooops, just realized this is old. So what was it doing in my RSS feed?
- Speaking of chiles, here’s a couple of more things on Native American agriculture.
- Free access to the first issue of volume 20 of Journal for Nature Conservation for the next 12 months.
- Rebuilding the genebank in Ivory Coast.
- Discovering the wonders of the coconut. Their headline, not mine.
- The latest news from the John Innes Centre’s genebank.
- Fancy a tulip? To eat, that is.
Nibbles: Baby ginger, Livestock, Teaching, Organic seeds, Pawpaw, Citrus, Ethiopia
- Baby ginger, if you can offer tropical conditions and want to make money.
- ILRI beefs about the lack of interest in livestock in the run-up to Rio+20.
- Teachers! A resource! What Are Seed Gene Banks and How Do They Work?
- Farmer unthreatened by GMOs grows organic seed for others.
- Botanist documents flowers of (one kind of) pawpaw.
- Woman takes a trip down memory lane during visit to citrus field genebank.
- Ethiopians improve their food security with roots and tubers. Wot, no bananas?
Nibbles: Tree Cotton, Organic labelling, Kosher marijuana, African Ag R&D
- Is tree cotton (Gossypium arboretum) about to enjoy a renaissance?
- What on earth is “gay” about organic labelling being equivalent in the USA and the EU?
- Is marijuana kosher for Passover? h/t DannyChamowitz.
- What does Denis Kyetere, executive director of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation, foresee for the continent’s farmers?
Nibbles: Potaghurt, Yams, New fodder crops, Enset, Cowpea migrations, Trees
- Sweet potato and milk “potaghurt”. Just one way Ghanaian women gain from roots and tubers.
- Another way being through a US$12 million project “to boost yam productivity”.
- Dual purpose crops to sustain livestock and people in India.
- Qocho in Chicago. Calling enset “false-banana” doesn’t do it justice.
- Cowpeas came to Mexico from three separate continents, but is The Beaneater really eating cowpeas? Not necessarily.
- We need to see the trees for the woods, says a new book from ICRAF.
Brainfood: Medicinal plants, Einkorn diversity, Chestnut diversity, Leeks etc, Phylogenetic diversity
- The Use of Phylogeny to Interpret Cross-Cultural Patterns in Plant Use and Guide Medicinal Plant Discovery: An Example from Pterocarpus (Leguminosae. It’s kinda like parallel evolution.
- Genetic diversity in the Red wild einkorn: T. urartu Gandilyan (Poaceae: Triticeae). Northwest Syria and South Turkey contain the most genetic diversity, and genetic similarity is not a proxy for geographic closeness.
- Castanea spp. biodiversity conservation: collection and characterization of the genetic diversity of an endangered species. Overview of a 7-year project to conserve and study sweet chestnut diversity.
- Diversity in Allium ampeloprasum: from small and wild to large and cultivated. The continuing, complex saga of onion, leek and garlic evolution. It’s about heterozygosity, rathen than ploidy.
- Phylogenetic diversity promotes ecosystem stability. How crazy is that!