- Global map and indicators of food system sustainability. Includes crop diversity, based on Khoury et al.
- Phenotyping and Plant Breeding: Overcoming the Barriers. Mostly comes down to good experimental design.
- The Spatial-Temporal Dynamics of Potato Agrobiodiversity in the Highlands of Central Peru: A Case Study of Smallholder Management across Farming Landscapes. Intensification and upward movement, while maintaining diversity.
- Diversity of a Large Collection of Natural Populations of Mango (Mangifera indica Linn.) Revealed by Agro-Morphological and Quality Traits. Lowish diversity, but not so low as to fail to provide year-round production.
- Intraspecific diversification of the crop wild relative Brassica cretica Lam. using demographic model selection. Diverse populations do not necessarily mean diverse adaptation.
- Crop Origins and Phylo Food: A database and a phylogenetic tree to stimulate comparative analyses on the origins of food crops. When and where current crops were domesticated.
- The climatic challenge: Which plants will people use in the next century? When and where future crops will be domesticated.
- Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492. 56 million deaths.
- Multidimensional characterization of global food supply from 1961 to 2013. Animal-source foods + sugar up in the East, down in the West. Everybody’s eating their vegetables.
- Exploring solution spaces for nutrition-sensitive agriculture in Kenya and Vietnam. Could grown more, and different, vegetables.
- Evaluation of early vigor traits in wild olive germplasm. Potential as dwarfing rootstocks.
- Agronomic and biochemical evaluation of cassava clones with roots that have pink pulp. 2 of 9 from the Embrapa collection have potential.
- Management Practices and Breeding History of Varieties Strongly Determine the Fine Genetic Structure of Crop Populations: A Case Study Based on European Wheat Populations. Landraces show more intra-sample diversity than modern varieties. Wait, there must be more to it than that…
- High-resolution and bias-corrected CMIP5 projections for climate change impact assessments. 7 TB of data for your delectation, thanks to CGIAR.
Find you way around another nutrition database
The Priority Food Tree and Crop Food Composition Database contains nutritional information of selected tree foods and crops, with geographical focus on sub-Saharan Africa. The current version (version 1) comprises 132 foods (out of 99 species) and 30 components. All component values are presented per 100 g edible portion on fresh weight basis (EP). In addition to actual food composition values, the database includes scores for all foods – “high source”, “source”, “present, but low source”, or “not a source” – of the selected micronutrients iron, vitamin A, folate and vitamin C. Searches can be done by food name, scientific name and by food group.
Pretty clear, no? Well, if not, there’s now a user guide.
Search the database here. And rank all the foods by their contents of iron, folate, vitamin A or vitamin C here.
But before you ask, no, there’s no variety-level information. Mango is mango, maize is maize. For that you have to go to other databases.
Brainfood: Bean diversity treble, Edited tomatoes, Breeding strategies, Pseudocereals, American lost crops, Genotyping collections, Apple diversity, Rice domestication, Cotton domestication, Wheat & gluten, Rubus phylogeny, Cassava brown streak, Prices & migration, Edible caterpillars
- Resequencing of 683 common bean genotypes identifies yield component trait associations across a north–south cline. There’s a fairly straightforward way to select for larger beans as a key component of yield.
- Is the USDA core collection of common bean representative of genetic diversity of the species, as assessed by SNP diversity? Not as much as it could be.
- Diversity, use and production of farmers’ varieties of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L., Fabaceae) in southwestern and northeastern Ethiopia. There are more varieties per household in places where the overall number of varieties per community was lower.
- Rapid customization of Solanaceae fruit crops for urban agriculture. Gene editing for shorter tomatoes.
- The home field advantage of modern plant breeding. Public breeding programs should go for specialist varieties that perform reliably in narrow environments.
- Thinking Outside of the Cereal Box: Breeding Underutilized (Pseudo)Cereals for Improved Human Nutrition. The next quinoa awaits its 15 minutes.
- Experimental Cultivation of Eastern North America’s Lost Crops: Insights into Agricultural Practice and Yield Potential. There’s life in the old crops yet. And that’s before gene editing.
- Time for a paradigm shift in the use of plant genetic resources. Genotype everything.
- Using whole-genome SNP data to reconstruct a large multi-generation pedigree in apple germplasm. 3 early modern cultivars had a disproportionate impact on modern apples.
- Machine Learning Reveals Spatiotemporal Genome Evolution in Asian Rice Domestication. The indica and japonica sub-species have exchanged a lot of genetic material at different times, and you get different answers to the question of domestication depending on which bits you look at.
- Genetic Analysis of the Transition from Wild to Domesticated Cotton (G. hirsutum L.). There are fibre quality genes in the subgenome from the parent with unspinnable fibre. Go figure.
- A Comparative Study of Modern and Heirloom Wheat on Indicators of Gastrointestinal Health. Not much difference.
- Target Capture Sequencing Unravels Rubus Evolution. The taxonomy needs work. You don’t say.
- Expansion of the cassava brown streak pandemic in Uganda revealed by annual field survey data for 2004 to 2017. The history of a disease outbreak in excruciating detail.
- Crop prices and the individual decision to migrate. Decrease in the price of coffee in Vietnam (but not rice, which is mainly used for household consumption rather than export) resulted in increased chance of migration, but only for individuals of lower education.
- The contribution of ‘chitoumou’, the edible caterpillar Cirina butyrospermi, to the food security of smallholder farmers in southwestern Burkina Faso. It’s significant, but only during the caterpillar season. I guess they don’t keep. I spot an opportunity. Yeah, you guessed it, gene editing.
Brainfood: Potato genebanks, Aichi 11, Taming foxes, Fruit diversity, Polyploidy review, Evaluating quinoa, Into Africa, IPCC review, Desiccation tolerance, Pig diversity, Oolong diversity, Wild millet, Sustainable diets
- Ex Situ Conservation of Potato [Solanum Section Petota (Solanaceae)] Genetic Resources in Genebanks. The only review of the subject you’ll need. Until the next one.
- Editorial Essay: An update on progress towards Aichi Biodiversity Target 11. Not bad, but the difficult stuff remains difficult. One of several interesting papers.
- The History of Farm Foxes Undermines the Animal Domestication Syndrome. Those Russian foxes were already pretty tame. Here’s a Twitter tread from one of the authors that lays it all out.
- Developing fruit tree portfolios that link agriculture more effectively with nutrition and health: a new approach for providing year-round micronutrients to smallholder farmers. 11 species can address micronutrient gaps.
- Plant Polyploidy: Origin, Evolution, and Its Influence on Crop Domestication. Extreme events and disasters drive polyploidy, which drives diversification at various levels, which facilitates domestication.
- Spectral Reflectance Indices and Physiological Parameters in Quinoa under Contrasting Irrigation Regimes. Phenotyping for drought tolerance from space.
- Asian Crop Dispersal in Africa and Late Holocene Human Adaptation to Tropical Environments. Via NE Africa always something new.
- Invited review: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agriculture, and food — A case of shifting cultivation and history. The IPCC could have done a better job of synthesizing the data on the impact of climate change on crops and livestock.
- Seed comparative genomics in three coffee species identify desiccation tolerance mechanisms in intermediate seeds. Whole bunch of genes involved.
- Capturing genetic diversity – an assessment of the nation’s gene bank in securing Duroc pigs. Genebank doing a pretty good job in this case.
- Genetic diversity of oolong tea (Camellia sinensis) germplasms based on the nanofluidic array of single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers. It’s not all the same.
- Tapping Pennisetum violaceum, a wild relative of pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum), for resistance to blast (caused by Magnaporthe grisea) and rust (caused by Puccinia substriata var. indica). Out of 305 accessions, one was resistant to both diseases. IP21711 if you must know. A few more were resistant to one or the other disease.
- Can Diets Be Healthy, Sustainable, and Equitable? No, and they’ll be difficult to change, but the “burden of change should not be solely placed on the consumer’s ability to make healthy choices.”
Food system research roundup from IFPRI
According to IFPRI, “2019 saw increasing attention to the intersections of food systems and environmental sustainability throughout the year,” and I thing they’re probably right. That makes it increasingly difficult to keep track of what’s going on. Fortunately, they took the trouble of providing a useful summary in their last newsletter of the year. Do read the whole newsletter, and subscribe, but here’s their list of 2019 research highlights.
Healthy diets from sustainable food systems
The EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health published a study in January outlining how to sustainably feed a future population of 10 billion people a healthy diet. IFPRI Director General Shenggen Fan served as a Commissioner for the report and provided his key takeaways in a video message and blog post.Seizing the momentum for agriculture and nutrition
In February, IFPRI and CABI published Agriculture for Improved Nutrition: Seizing the Momentum reviewing the latest findings, results from on-the-ground programs and interventions, and recent policy experiences from countries around the world that are forging the agriculture and nutrition sectors closer together. The book launch was hosted by IFPRI and accompanied by a three-part blog series, beginning with a post by the book’s editors.Over 100 million people faced acute hunger in 2018
According to the Global Report on Food Crises 2019 released in April, more than 113 million people across 53 countries experienced acute hunger in 2018 driven primarily by conflict and insecurity, climate shocks, and economic turbulence. A mid-year update to the report published in September provided revised numbers on current global food crises.Increasing CO2 levels and projected climate change reduce nutrient content
A study published in The Lancet Planetary Health in July estimated that the combined effects of projected increases in atmospheric CO2 will reduce the global availability of nutrients by 19.5 percent for protein, 14.4 percent for iron, and 14.6 percent for zinc relative to expected technology and market gains by 2050.Global hunger still on the rise for third year in a row
More than 820 million people did not have enough to eat in 2018, over 9 million more than in 2017. This was the third year of increase in a row according to the annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2019 report launched in July. IFPRI and FAO hosted a discussion on the key findings of the report.UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children report explores the changing face of malnutrition
For the first time in 20 years, UNICEF’s flagship report released in October examined the issue of children, food, and nutrition, providing a fresh perspective on a rapidly evolving challenge. It found that despite progress in the past two decades, one third of children under age 5 are malnourished and two thirds are at risk of malnutrition and hidden hunger because of the poor quality of their diets.The global food system delivers the wrong prices of healthy and unhealthy foods
An article published in The Journal of Nutrition in November assessed the relative caloric prices for different food categories across 176 countries and found that prices vary systematically across countries and partially explain international differences in the prevalences of undernutrition and overweight adults. In an IFPRI blog post, the paper’s authors noted that as countries develop, their food systems get better at providing healthier foods cheaply, but they also get better at providing unhealthier foods cheaply.Assessing the affordability of the EAT–Lancet reference diet
A study published in November in The Lancet Global Health used food price and household income data of 159 countries to estimate affordability of the benchmark diets recommended in the EAT-Lancet Commission report. The conclusion is that the reference diet costs a small fraction of average incomes in high-income countries but is not affordable for the world’s poor: to improve diets for them, some combination of higher income, nutritional assistance, and lower prices would be needed.