- 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.”
Culture, Agriculture, Food & Environment, and genebanks
Dr Helen Anne Curry, Peter Lipton Lecturer in History of Modern Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge, guest edited a special issue on “The Collection and Conservation of Plant Genetic Resources” for the journal Culture, Agriculture, Food & Environment in December.
Looks good. A couple of the papers are even open access. I admit I haven’t read them yet, but I will, and report back.
And watch out for Dr Curry’s new project “From Collection to Cultivation: Historical Perspectives on Crop Diversity and Food Security,” which is launching this year with support from a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award.
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.
Brainfood: Food access, Rare species, Italian landraces, Forest status, CC & production, Myanmar nutrition, Super-pangenome, Plant pest priorities, Peanut resistance, Maize coring, EAT-Lancet costs, Sorghum tannins double, Dutch cattle core
- Food Access Deficiencies in Sub-saharan Africa: Prevalence and Implications for Agricultural Interventions. Income doesn’t necessarily translate into better nutrition, but keeping livestock does. Happy New Year.
- The commonness of rarity: Global and future distribution of rarity across land plants. Rare species are especially vulnerable to climate and land use change.
- Exploring on-farm agro-biodiversity: a study case of vegetable landraces from Puglia region (Italy). High vegetable landrace diversity may be linked to poor soils and distance from urban centres.
- Measuring Forest Biodiversity Status and Changes Globally. Combines biodiversity significance and intactness, and comes up with not that many places.
- Escaping the perfect storm of simultaneous climate change impacts on agriculture and marine fisheries. Business as usual means 90% of world’s population will see declines in both agricultural and fisheries production.
- Potential for smart food products in rural Myanmar: use of millets and pigeonpea to fill the nutrition gap. 2 weeks of inclusion had positive effect on wasting, stunting and underweight.
- Super-Pangenome by Integrating the Wild Side of a Species for Accelerated Crop Improvement. Add up species pangenomes for a whole genepool. Would be cool to grow it.
- Plant Pest Impact Metric System (PPIMS): Framework and guidelines for a common set of metrics to classify and prioritise plant pests. Host crop value, market access, feasibility of management and reversibility are the most important ones.
- A new source of root-knot nematode resistance from Arachis stenosperma incorporated into allotetraploid peanut (Arachis hypogaea). You have to cross it with another wild relative first.
- The impact of sample selection strategies on genetic diversity and representativeness in germplasm bank collections. Different approaches to making cores tested with maize data from Seeds of Discovery.
- Affordability of the EAT–Lancet reference diet: a global analysis. US$2.84 per day, or more than household per capita income for at least 1.58 billion people.
- Allelochemicals targeted to balance competing selections in African agroecosystems. Levels of tannins in sorghum correlated with taste receptor variant in humans and presence of sparrows.
- Genetic Architecture of Chilling Tolerance in Sorghum Dissected with a Nested Association Mapping Population. Chilling tolerance associated with low tannin and short stature. No word on the role of sparrows.
- Characterization of Genetic Diversity Conserved in the Gene Bank for Dutch Cattle Breeds. Almost optimized, at least for bulls.
Brainfood: Food system, Fish cryo, Bromeliad maps, Ag risk, Grass pollination, Gendered cassava, Sorghum salinity, Soybean subsetting, Reverse speciation, Legume data, Livestock diseases, Buckwheat diversity, Wild barley genome, Wild sorghums, Wheat gap
- Impacts of Global Food Systems on Biodiversity and Water: The Vision of Two Reports and Future Aims. It’s all connected, and not in a good way.
- On‐Site Capabilities of a Mobile Laboratory for Aquatic Germplasm Cryopreservation. Not so easy for plants, alas.
- Biogeography and conservation status of the pineapple family (Bromeliaceae). The Atlantic Forest, the northern Andes and Central America.
- A review of types of risks in agriculture: What we know and what we need to know. Very few studies look beyond production risk, largely ignoring four other types of risk, and the prevalence of multiple risks.
- Visual and olfactory floral cues related to ambophilous pollination systems in Poaceae. Insects can facilitate pollination in some grasses.
- Cassava Trait Preferences of Men and Women Farmers in Nigeria: Implications for Breeding. Women select on quality, men on agronomy.
- Phenotypic and physiological responses to salt exposure in Sorghum reveal diversity among domesticated landraces. Salinity tolerance was acquired early in domestication and then maintained or lost depending on prevalent soil conditions.
- Combining Focused Identification of Germplasm and Core Collection Strategies to Identify Genebank Accessions for Central European Soybean Breeding. Pre-core FIGS subset based on adaptation to high-latitude cold regions, followed by coring using genotype data: from >17,000 to 366 accessions.
- Adaptive introgression during environmental change can weaken reproductive isolation. Reverse speciation is upon us.
- The future of legume genetic data resources: Challenges, opportunities, and priorities. Centralize and standardise. Good luck with that.
- Application of Mixed Methods to Identify Small Ruminant Disease Priorities in Ethiopia. National disease controls programmes may be on the wrong track.
- Tartary buckwheat (Fagopyrum tataricum Gaertn.) landraces cultivated by Yi people in Liangshan, China. 13 landraces, but not very well differentiated as to use.
- The draft genome of a wild barley genotype reveals its enrichment in genes related to biotic and abiotic stresses compared to cultivated barley. More genes, more alleles in known genes.
- The endemic ‘sugar canes’ of Madagascar (Poaceae, Saccharinae: Lasiorhachis) are close relatives of sorghum. Closer than some actual Sorghum spp.
- Large genetic yield potential and genetic yield gap estimated for wheat in Europe. Long way to go to match the potential, modelled yield of ideotypes.