Nibbles

Nibbles: BananaGuard, Wheat has a blast, Grow your own antibiotic, Bhutanese cypress, Natural history collections, Genebanks big & small, Better grasslands, Local foodways

Who needs resistant banana varieties when you have synthetic biology? And more.
More trouble for wheat, and climate change is to blame. Maybe Vavilov can help there too?
DIY penicillin.
Saving the sacred cypress. Try saying that quickly.
What have herbaria ever done for us? Apart from giving us endless joy, you mean?
The Indian and other ‪genebanks‬ securing the future of food. But see also our earlier post on Dr Tyagi’s paper.
Aboriginal community gets a genebank.
We need better grass. No, not that kind of grass. Well, not only that kind of grass.
A pean for African food cultures. And Pacific ones too.

“È curioso che il grano Cappelli, ora diventato un simbolo della “pasta da gourmet”, fosse una volta il comune grano della pasta di tutti i giorni, e che venga da alcuni considerato “autoctono” quando in realtà è una varietà tunisina.” Curious indeed.
A woman’s crop? Not as straightforward as it may sound.
State of the World’s Plants symposium, 11-12 May.
Above will no doubt consider crop wild relatives such as the peanut’s.
More on the urban vegetable gardens of Istanbul.
Tree DGs in the garden getting coffee. On International Forest Day.
The “Bernie Sanders” vision of biofortification.
Cowpea to get a genome.
Q&A with John Torgrimson of Seed Savers Exchange.
The resilience of rice: “You never find a crop that can span this latitude and altitude.” Really? Wheat?
Cacao and coffee have a microbial terroir.
Crop mixes are geographically stable.
Prof. Kathy Willis of Kew on Feeding the World, including using crop wild relatives. IRRI Kew genebanks featured.
Denmark interprets EU law to allow seed saving.

Coffee botany resources.
Uncovering the illegal agarwood trade.
Developing the potato bean. First step: find a new name.
Dog taxonomy explained.
Project Baseline sets a, ahem, baseline, for studying plant diversity under climate change.
Ok, random shout-out for my niece Francesca’s work on kudzu bug natural control. Because I can. And she’s fabulous.
Blooming chickpeas!
The inhabitants of Casas Grandes brewed maize beer in the 14th century. Well of course they did.
Peruvian quinoa landscapes have a name: aynokas.
Crop domestication 101.
Where (commercial) breeders go wrong.
Presumably none of above mistakes are made by EU plant breeding companies.
Stimulating plant defences for faster response to pest and disease attack.
Germany told to go for local meadow seeds.
Use of shea butter trees goes way back.

This origin-of-dogs saga is getting tedious. Figure it out, already.
Dutch wheat varieties still improving.
Chinese ate wild grasses for 20,000 years before domesticating crops.
Fungal endophyte helps tall fescue cope with drought and high temperatures, but some fungal genotypes more than others. And some do it without producing livestock toxins.

Climate change is going to hit us where we live. Or die.
How to make GBIF more relevant for agrobiodiversity: a 10-point plan.
Killer fungi on the loose? ‘Twas ever thus. But genomics will save us?
Planting trees is good for lions too.
There are still medieval oaks in England.
“…where sommelier-like ‘budtenders’ sell gourmet ganja in a designer showroom.”
Rewilding the wild horse.
More about the cassava variety Kasetsart 50, poster child for CGIAR impact.
It’s not just genetic resources that are contested. Yep, agronomy too.
“Scientific conclusions and business or policy decisions should not be based only on whether a p-value passes a specific threshold.”