Nibbles – Page 498 – Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

June 5, 2007June 5, 2007

How rhizobia work

Another attempt to persuade non-leguminous plants to enter into a nitrogen-fixing symbiosis with rhizobia.

June 5, 2007June 5, 2007

Orange cauliflower gene

The gene for orange cauliflowers promotes storage, not manufacture, of carotenes. A new approach to enhancing nutrition?

June 4, 2007June 4, 2007

Guinea pigs

As well as feeding Andean peoples for centuries, guinea pigs have helped win twenty-three Nobel Prizes.

Bioinformatics projects database

Interested in information on biodiversity information projects?

June 1, 2007June 1, 2007

Sustainable tea

Unilever, which buys 12% of the world’s tea production, wants it all certified sustainable by 2015.

1. In the UK, Herefordshire’s Museum of Cider is picking up national recognition for its genebank of heritage apple trees. The BBC’s canonical autumnal apple story comes a little early this year.
2. Speaking of iconic apples, Kazakhstan is scaling up efforts to bring back the Aport, the giant heirloom that once made Almaty famous. No word of museums, though. Or cider.
3. Over in the Philippines, Department of Environment and Natural Resources is beefing up its rattan genebank to keep pace with demand, with forest stewards in Bukidnon planting seedlings to match. Furniture makers need genebanks as much as cider makers.
4. Sri Lanka’s pre-Green Revolution heirloom rice varieties, purana haal, are being eyed for their resilience and disease-management potential. Good thing they’re in the national genebank.
5. Saudi Arabia’s Jazan terraced coffee farms are turning into rural and ecotourism hotspots, proving not all agrobiodiversity needs to be in a genebank to survive. But it helps.
Published on August 9, 2026