- The Coffee Science Foundation is the science foundation we all need.
- In search of Bob’s ganja.
- Vox vid on saving crop diversity. Pretty good, except for that thorn apple thing.
- GIZ support for the CIP genebank.
- Ex-CIP breeder works with VIR to bring wild potatoes to Cornell.
- Or friend Lex Thomson on why Fiji is a hibiscus hotspot.
- Celebrate European cereal diversity.
- Dan Barber on freeing the seed. The polarisation continues.
- The first British farmers walked there.
- CIMMYT rebuttal of a paper saying European wheat varieties are decreasing in their climate resilience.
- Celery was once a luxury.
Brainfood: Plant blindness, African goats, Tissue culture, Phenotyping databases, Mekong transformation, African Fertile Crescent, Salty tomatoes, Pigeonpea domestication, Pharaonic watermelon, Apple domestication, Social media and PAs, Messaging, De novo domestication
- Resetting the table for people and plants: Botanic gardens and research organizations collaborate to address food and agricultural plant blindness. There are so many ways to get people interested in plants.
- A review on goats in southern Africa: an untapped genetic resource. 500-600 years of natural selection must count for something.
- Agromorphologic, genetic and methylation profiling of Dioscorea and Musa species multiplied under three micropropagation systems. Methylation at some loci, but no phenotypic differences.
- Modelling Crop Genetic Resources Phenotyping Information Systems. Field to figures.
- Agricultural and food systems in the Mekong region: Drivers of transformation and pathways of change. Corn everywhere.
- Yam genomics supports West Africa as a major cradle of crop domestication. The Niger River Basin, to be precise. How long before corn takes over?
- A diversity of traits contributes to salinity tolerance of wild Galapagos tomatoes seedlings. 3 out of 67 accessions of 2 wild endemic species showed particularly high salinity tolerance.
- Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp. origins and domestication: the South and Southeast Asian archaeobotanical evidence. Here’s ground zero for domestication starting about 5000 years ago: 19.397833, 80.813132.
- A 3500-year-old leaf from a Pharaonic tomb reveals that New Kingdom Egyptians were cultivating domesticated watermelon. A Nile Valley origin?
- Origins of the Apple: The Role of Megafaunal Mutualism in the Domestication of Malus and Rosaceous Trees. Large fruits originally evolved to attract wild horses, deer and bears, which spread them far and wide; populations isolated by the Ice Age were brought back together by humans.
- Assessing global popularity and threats to Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas using social media data. Accessibility and infrastructure more important than biodiversity.
- Messaging matters: A systematic review of the conservation messaging literature. Communications professionals think that more input from communications professionals is needed for conservation professionals to communicate professionally.
- De Novo Domestication: An Alternative Route toward New Crops for the Future. Lots to play with, that’s for sure.
Brainfood: Napier diversity, Clover expansion, Social media & conservation, Orphan crops double, Rewilding chestnut, N-fixing trees, Horse diversity double, Steppe weed, Old medicinals, Wild dates, Sorghum resistance
- Genotyping by sequencing provides new insights into the diversity of Napier grass (Cenchrus purpureus) and reveals variation in genome-wide LD patterns between collections. Complementarity between ILRI and Embrapa collections.
- Breaking Free: the Genomics of Allopolyploidy-facilitated Niche Expansion in White Clover. From two quite different, specialized habitats, to a global presence, through polyploidy.
- Likes, comments, and shares of marine organism imagery on Facebook. Use really nice pictures, and don’t worry too much about the captions.
- African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC): status of developing genomic resources for African orphan crops. 150 African breeders trained, one or more forms of sequence data produced for 60 crops, reference genome sequences for 6 species published, 6 near completion, 19 in progress.
- The role of genetics in mainstreaming the production of new and orphan crops to diversify food systems and support human nutrition. Well it’s a good job there’s the above, then.
- Evaluation of sites for the reestablishment of the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) in northeast Georgia, USA. Overwhelmingly on federal land, which may or may not be a good thing.
- Patterns of nitrogen‐fixing tree abundance in forests across Asia and America. Much rarer in Asia than in the Americas.
- Tracking Five Millennia of Horse Management with Extensive Ancient Genome Time Series. Iberian and Siberian domesticated horse lineages went extinct, but the Muslim conquests injected some much-needed diversity.
- Chinese Mongolian horses may retain early domestic male genetic lineages yet to be discovered. Wait, does Mongolian=Siberian?
- Cannabis in Asia: its center of origin and early cultivation, based on a synthesis of subfossil pollen and archaeobotanical studies. The northeastern Tibetan Plateau, to be precise, with the first steppe communities.
- Paleomedicine and the use of plant secondary compounds in the Paleolithic and Early Neolithic. Self-medication goes back a long time.
- Genetic characterization of tertiary relict endemic Phoenix theophrasti populations in Turkey and phylogenetic relations of the species with other palm species revealed by SSR markers. Probably endangered.
- Genome wide association analysis of sorghum mini core lines regarding anthracnose, downy mildew, and head smut. 9 photo-sensitive and 4 photo insensitive accessions are multiple sources for resistance to anthracnose, SDM and head smut.
Nibbles: Retiring Ellis, Teff patent, Rice in Bangladesh, Indian wild wheat, Livestock wild relatives, Bambara groundnut, Han diversity, Danone cultures, Drumming, IPBES, World Bee Day, Agroforestry
- Dave Ellis retires, world celebrates. Wait, that came out wrong…
- The Dutch teff patent saga.
- Saving rice diversity in Bangladesh.
- Conserving and using wild wheat in India.
- Livestock have wild relatives too.
- It’s the “minor” crops, stupid.
- The most expensive pistachios in the world.
- Human diversity and domestication in E Asia, summarized in a cool map.
- Open yoghurt.
- The connection between Nigerian music and watermelons. Yes, there is one.
- Summarizing reaction to IPBES.
- Happy World Bee Day.
- Oh, and I almost forgot, follow the livestream of the World Congress on Agroforestry.
Brainfood: Rice longevity, HTFP, Carob diversity, Coffee diversity, Tea in China, In situ CWR, Hot potatoes, Luffa diversity, Sorghum production constraints, Flax diversity, Fox snout drugs, Hybrids and adaptation
- A high proportion of beta-tocopherol in vitamin E is associated with poor seed longevity in rice produced under temperate conditions. The ratio of different antioxidants is an indicator of seed longevity.
- Review: High-throughput phenotyping to enhance the use of crop genetic resources. Phenomics is the new genomics.
- Genetic structure analysis and selection of a core collection for carob tree germplasm conservation and management. NE Spain is different to the rest.
- Population structure and genetic relationships between Ethiopian and Brazilian Coffea arabica genotypes revealed by SSR markers. Western Ethiopian diversity is largely untapped.
- Clustering analysis for wild ancient tea germplasm resources in Debao County and Longlin County, Guangxi based on SSR molecular markers. They’re quite different to tea from others parts of China.
- Modeling of crop wild relative species identifies areas globally for in situ conservation. 150 sites needed for 65% of 1200 CWR species in 167 genepools.
- Heat Tolerance in Diploid Wild Potato Species In Vitro. S. kurtzianum and S. sogarandinum were the most heat tolerant.
- The establishment of the species-delimits and varietal-identities of the cultivated germplasm of Luffa acutangula and Luffa aegyptiaca in Sri Lanka using morphometric, organoleptic and phylogenetic approaches. The less grown species tasted better.
- A Regional Comparison of Factors Affecting Global Sorghum Production: The Case of North America, Asia and Africa’s Sahel. New varieties needed, and seed exchange.
- The genetic structure of flax illustrates environmental and anthropogenic selections that gave rise to its eco-geographical adaptation. 4 major groups: Temperate, South Asian, Abyssinian and Mediterranean.
- Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America. Well that’s like your opinion, man.
- Hybridization speeds adaptive evolution in an eight-year field experiment. n=2, but still.