- Not-so-suffering sassafrass.
- Another seed library, this one in Canada.
- Fruit breeder Dr David Cain gets 2020 Wilder Medal from American Pomological Society.
- PowerPoint on plant breeding. Dr Cain unavailable for comment.
- Which species can you bank anyway? With video goodness. Which I agree is not all that unusual these days, but still.
Nibbles: Yunnan mushrooms, Torres Is bananas, Boxgrove, Gluten trends, Apple rootstocks, USDA horticulture job
- There’s a sort of mycological culinary hotspot in Yunnan… Yeah, I thought that too.
- Signs found of old banana cultivation in Australia. Well, kinda. As in not as old as in PNG, and not mainland Australia.
- Really, really old horse butchery site in southern England excavated. When the Brits ate horses. Well, kinda.
- New wheat is pretty much like old wheat, gluten-wise at least.
- Breeding better apple rootstocks at USDA. A hitherto somewhat neglected aspect of apple genetic conservation and improvement.
- Speaking of USDA, here’s another job.
Brainfood: Global Food Security, Neutral diversity, Bottlenecks, Slovenian lettuce, Swedish apples, Mungbean diversity, Crop suitability, Breeding graph, Herding diet, Cool shit, Seed storage double, Wild quinoa, Mighty wind
- A research vision for food systems in the 2020s: Defying the status quo. Research is necessary but not sufficient.
- Dismantling a dogma: the inflated significance of neutral genetic diversity in conservation genetics. Not all genetic diversity is created equal.
- A re‐evaluation of the domestication bottleneck from archaeogenomic evidence. Not so much a single bottleneck “event” on domestication, as serial bottlenecks post-domestication. Another dogma dismantled?
- Morphological and genetic diversity of Slovene lettuce landrace ‘Ljubljanska ledenka’ (Lactuca sativa L.). Not all iceberg is created equal.
- Genetic Status of the Swedish Central collection of heirloom apple cultivars. Neutral diversity is not completely useless, though?
- Understanding genetic variability in the mungbean (Vigna radiata L.) genepool. It may not be neutral variation, but it’s not associated with geography. If you see what I mean.
- A Land Evaluation Framework for Agricultural Diversification. Soil and climate data –> fancy maths –> pretty good prediction of where you find a crop.
- A unifying concept of animal breeding programs. You can describe any breeding programme by using graph theory. But would it help?
- Molecular and isotopic evidence for milk, meat, and plants in prehistoric eastern African herder food systems. Chemical and isotope analysis of lipids on ceramic shards shows early herding societies had a pretty diverse diet.
- Pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas identified by human fecal biomarkers in coprolites from Paisley Caves, Oregon. Lipids again, this time at the other end of the process, and of the world.
- Identification of novel seed longevity genes related to oxidative stress and seed coat by genome‐wide association studies and reverse genetics. Seeds need to take their antioxidants.
- Evaluation of genetic integrity of pearl millet seeds during aging by genomic-SSR markers. Loss of viability leads to loss of diversity.
- Geographical distribution of quinoa crop wild relatives in the Peruvian Andes: a participatory mapping initiative. Cultivated land is as important as more “natural” ecosystems for quinoa wild relatives.
- Global wind patterns and the vulnerability of wind-dispersed species to climate change. In the tropics, and in the lee of mountains, wind-dispersed species will find it more difficult to reach places with suitable future climates.
Nibbles: USA020, Protected areas, Svalbard, Indian sugarcane, Ġgantija, Fishy spice, Ft Collins video, Gums
- Important job opening at USDA running the Ames Plant Introduction Station. 50,000 accessions, people.
- Online database on the effectiveness of protected areas.
- 100-year seed experiment kicks off.
- Towards more sustainable sugarcane in India. Spoiler alert: juice, not molasses.
- The Neolithic temples of Malta were used to worship food.
- The “fish pepper” of Black Chesapeake homegardens lost, and found..
- News clip on the USDA central genebank at Ft Collins.
- Invest 50 mins in learning about eucalypts.
Nibbles: UN training, Genebanks double, CG spatial data, Fruit IPR, Citrus greening, Sikkim diversity, Bulgarian lavender, Biogenetic Paradoxes, Heroin, Palestinian eggplant
- Training courses on multilateral environmental agreements, including CBD and Plant Treaty.
- CGIAR dashboard on the Genebank Platform. More data here.
- Some of the above are included in this list of the world’s most high profile genebanks.
- The latest spatial crop data from CGIAR. Useful for genebanks, among other things.
- Protecting fruit intellectual property. Wait, that didn’t come out right.
- I guess this fruit is next.
- Sikkim’s agricultural diversity as colours on a palette.
- Lavender is a nice colour, whether in France or Bulgaria.
- Book on nation-building through agricultural biodiversity. Bulgarians unavailable for comment.
- Poppy diversity being helped by solar panels to build something or other in Afghanistan.
- Palestinian paean to the bitinjan. Jeremy goes to town on it in his latest newsletter.