- Telegraph op-ed on agricultural biodiversity. Yeah, you read that right.
- No, avocado does not come from the Aztec’s word for testicles. It’s the other way around.
- Why honey is a keeper.
- Mapping the hell out of pigs.
- Photo database to help tell bananas apart.
- Deconstructing the Tragedy of the Commons.
- The C footprint of your diet.
- “We can spare 50 percent and share the rest.”
- Cave man caviar.
- Whiskey with that?
- Potato wild relatives and food security.
- Cassava and food security. No word on its wild relatives.
- Wales finds a new apple.
- Maybe someone will take a cool picture of it.
- Potatoes were always for the masses. Ok, but not sure anyone ever thought otherwise, though.
- Grapes, on the other hand…
- The cuisines of Africa get their shot.
- Some of those will go well with craft beer.
- Agricultural heritage list gets saffron and argan. Bet they go together well.
- Maybe wild kiang tea will get there too someday.
- Or the Aboriginal Australians. Not really agriculturalists, but still.
- Is this alpaca exploitation? Maybe you can take the promotion of agricultural biodiversity too far.
- Will the Svalbard Global Seed Vault qualify one day? Ten years on, still going strong. And return to top.
The multifarious origins of food
Could it be that we neglected to say anything at all back in the summer of 2016 about our friend Colin Khoury’s paper Origins of food crops connect countries worldwide? I can hardly believe it, but I can’t find anything at all in the blog’s archives. Weird in the extreme. 1 We were very good about Colin’s Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security, but we seem to have dropped the ball on the follow-up. Anyway, here’s the money quote from the abstract:
Countries are highly interconnected with regard to primary regions of diversity of the crops they cultivate and/or consume. Foreign crops are extensively used in food supplies (68.7% of national food supplies as a global mean are derived from foreign crops) and production systems (69.3% of crops grown are foreign). Foreign crop usage has increased significantly over the past 50 years, including in countries with high indigenous crop diversity.
You can explore the data on CIAT’s wonderful companion interactive website.
I bring this up now because Colin has come up with neat infographics illustrating how even nationally iconic foods like pizza can trace the origins of their ingredients to multiple regions of the world.
Now to do it for Mseto wa Maharagwe.
Brainfood: Distribution modelling, New mycorrhiza, Bean diversity, Collecting, Intensification, Wildish rice, Wild tomato genome, Conservation prioritization, Horizon scanning, Maize domestication, Livestock sustainability, Asexual rice
- Incorporating knowledge uncertainty into species distribution modelling. Not sure about this.
- A mycorrhizal revolution. “Fine root endophytes are arbuscule-forming fungi unexpectedly placed in Mucoromycotina.” Wow. I think.
- Genetic Diversity within Snap Beans and Their Relation to Dry Beans. Snap beans came from dry beans, but maybe more than once and from both Andean and Mesoamerican genepools, and now they make up 8 genepools.
- Two decades of evolutionary changes in Brassica rapa in response to fluctuations in precipitation and severe drought. It matters when you collect germplasm.
- Agricultural intensification, dietary diversity, and markets in the global food security narrative. What if it’s intensification through diversification, though? Didn’t think of that, did you?
- Seed characteristic variations and genetic structure of wild Zizania latifolia along a latitudinal gradient in China: implications for neo-domestication as a grain crop. Crop wild relative that is also a crop might be a good candidate to become another crop.
- The Genome Sequence of the Wild Tomato Solanum pimpinellifolium Provides Insights Into Salinity Tolerance. It’s all in the inositol pathway.
- Not all data are equal: Influence of data type and amount in spatial conservation prioritisation. Follow the money. Ok, to unpack that, read this.
- A Horizon Scan of Emerging Issues for Global Conservation in 2019. Biotechnological advances in crop breeding may impact insects and land use.
- Multiproxy evidence highlights a complex evolutionary legacy of maize in South America. Linguistics, archaeology and genetics say maize left Mexico semi-domesticated, was finished off and diversified in Amazonia.
- Assessing the Role of Cattle in Sustainable Food Systems. They still have one.
- A male-expressed rice embryogenic trigger redirected for asexual propagation through seeds. Clonal propagation of hybrids. What could possibly go wrong?
Brainfood: Glaucous wheat, Iranian barley, Pigeonpea breeding, Automated peas, Bavarian crop diversity, Bean micronutrients, Wheat & CC, Introgression, Crossover, Decriminalizing landraces, Rationalizing Spain, Polish wheat
- Genetic Control of Glaucousness in Wheat Plants. Ok, good to know. Now what?
- Potential of Iranian wild barley (Hordeum vulgare ssp. spontaneum) in breeding for drought tolerance. Potential, potential, potential. Enough with the potential.
- Pigeonpea improvement: An amalgam of breeding and genomic research. “…very few genomic inputs…currently employed at ICRISAT.” Well, why not?
- Automated phenotyping for early vigour of field pea seedlings in controlled environment by colour imaging technology. How much money will be saved?
- Crop diversity and stability of revenue on farms in Central Europe: An analysis of big data from a comprehensive agricultural census in Bavaria. High prices for a few crops working against the effect of diversity on income stability.
- Screening common bean (P. vulgaris L.) germplasm for Fe and Zn biofortication. Almost there with the candidate genes. Almost. Compare and contrast with wheat.
- Climate change impact and adaptation for wheat protein. We’ll need better adapted varieties, but even they will not keep pace with grain quality demands.
- The extent of adaptive wild introgression in crops. Wild relatives are more than just crop ancestors.
- Unleashing meiotic crossovers in crops. It’s all in the RECQ4 gene.
- Decentralization and liberalization of seeds and plant genetic resources regulations in Europe: a Danish case study. If you want to grow and trade landraces, Denmark is your place.
- Plant genebanks: present situation and proposals for their improvement. The case of the Spanish Network. If you want to have a well-running national genebank system, on the other hand…
- Triticum polonicum L. as potential source material for the biofortification of wheat with essential micronutrients. Low strontium too.
Brainfood: Conservation indicator, Asian diversity, Sorghum QTLs, Wheat & barley evolution, Nematode detection, Gut microbiome, IBPGR base collection, Speed breeding, Pigeonpeas double, Dingo genetics, Wild tea, Yam anthracnose, Global land use change, Tree breeding double
- Comprehensiveness of conservation of useful wild plants: An operational indicator for biodiversity and sustainable development targets. Lots to do. Lots.
- The East Asiatic region of crop plant diversity. Southwest China especially rich, with its 44 species of kiwifruit, for example.
- The Sorghum QTL Atlas: a powerful tool for trait dissection, comparative genomics and crop improvement. Maybe this will get the stuff used a bit more.
- Domestication and crop evolution of wheat and barley: Genes, genomics, and future directions. Much progress recently, but high-resolution identification of crop-wild introgressions remains a gap.
- Real-time PCR, a great tool for fast identification, sensitive detection and quantification of important plant-parasitic nematodes. Results in 3 hours.
- Gut microbiome transition across a lifestyle gradient in Himalaya. Composition (but not diversity) can change in a generation when foragers transition to agriculture.
- Are the old International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR) base collections available through the Plant Treaty’s multilateral system of access and benefit sharing? A review. Well, about 80% of them may be.
- Speed breeding in growth chambers and glasshouses for crop breeding and model plant research. Hacking the breeders’ equation: one giant leap…
- The drivers and methodologies for exploiting wild Cajanus genome in pigeonpea breeding. Sources of high protein, CMS, self-pollination, and resistances to various biotic stresses; but may need to rethink the secondary genepool.
- Development and Application of High-Density Axiom Cajanus SNP Array with 56K SNPs to Understand the Genome Architecture of Released Cultivars and Founder Genotypes. Top 6 founders accounted for 50% of the genetic base of released cultivars. Could use more of the above, in other words.
- Genomic analysis of dingoes identifies genomic regions under reversible selection during domestication and feralization. They’re reverting to wolves, genetically speaking.
- Hongyacha, a Naturally Caffeine-Free Tea Plant from Fujian, China. Well, wild tea relative anyway.
- An EST-SSR based genetic linkage map and identification of QTLs for anthracnose disease resistance in water yam (Dioscorea alata L.). One QTL looks promising.
- Global assessment and mapping of changes in mesoscale landscapes: 1992–2015. Main changes were forest→agriculture, followed by agriculture→forest.
- Quantitative Genetics and Genomics Converge to Accelerate Forest Tree Breeding. Great potential, on the brink, just around the corner…
- Genome Editing in Trees: From Multiple Repair Pathways to Long-Term Stability. Great potential, on the brink, just around the corner…