- Culturally valuable minority crops provide a succession of floral resources for flower visitors in traditional orchard gardens. Proper gardens better for pollinators than unmanaged plots.
- Trends in access of plant biodiversity data revealed by Google Analytics. No impact of social media on the use of plant data, and the future is mobiles.
- Worldwide Genetic Diversity for Mineral Element Concentrations in Rice Grain. Most, though not all, elements showed high heritability, which is good news for breeders.
- Agriculture facilitated permanent human occupation of the Tibetan Plateau after 3600 BP. No barley, no Tibetans.
- Seed fates in crop-wild hybrid sunflowers: crop allele and maternal effects. Having wild mothers helps wild-crop hybrids survive in the wild.
- Coconut (Cocos nucifera l.) pollen cryopreservation. Eureka!
- The evolution of seed dormancy: environmental cues, evolutionary hubs, and diversification of the seed plants. More dormancy, more speciation.
- The evolutionary ecology of C4 plants. C4 opens new niches, but it’s all a matter of contingency and you have to follow the whole evolutionary history of a group to understand its current ecological strategy.
- A Minor Role for Environmental Adaptation in Local–Scale Maize Landrace Distribution: Results from a Common Garden Experiment in Oaxaca, Mexico. It’s the social factors, stupid.
- Crop immunity against viruses: outcomes and future challenges. PAMP (pathogen-associated molecular patterns)-triggered immunity (PTI) may be the future.
Brainfood: Daniel Zohary, Blue dates, Crop diversification, Tunisian oases, Cranberry diversity, Drought breeding, Seed-use watermelon, Cattle history, Apple conservation
- Daniel Zohary: Geneticist and Explorer of Plant Domestication. Nice profile of iconic explorer of agricultural biodiversity.
- The date palm with blue dates Phoenix senegalensis André (Arecaceae): A horticultural enigma is solved. A variety of P. canariensis, as it turns out.
- Crop diversification as a smallholder livelihood strategy within semi-arid agricultural systems near Mount Kenya. It will work better at higher elevations.
- Change of oases farming systems and their effects on vegetable species diversity: Case of oasian agro-systems of Nefzaoua (South of Tunisia). Not working at all in oases.
- Clonal diversity and genetic differentiation revealed by SSR markers in wild Vaccinium macrocarpon and Vaccinium oxycoccos. Cranberries have much more variation than previously thought.
- Two decades of InterDrought conferences: are we bridging the genotype-to-phenotype gap? Yes, slowly, but genomics will help. Eventually.
- Microsatellite Marker-based Genetic Diversity of Seed-use Watermelon (Citrullus lanatus ssp. vulgaris var. megalaspermus Lin et Chao) Collections. They’re all very similar.
- On the History of Cattle Genetic Resources. The loss of breeds adapted to local conditions and extensive management are the main threats to the genetic diversity amassed over the past 12,000 years.
- The vulnerability of US apple (Malus) genetic resources. Could be worse. Could be better.
Nibbles: R&D, Cheese double, Cali candied yams, Sustainable joe, Soy & deforestation, Cereals in Sudan, Big Ag, History of breeding
- ASTI says agricultural research investment in Africa is bearing fruit and needs to double.
- There’s a cheese revolution going on in America’s heartland.
- Meanwhile, the UK is worried about fake goat cheese.
- “Apparently, Californians like well-tanned sweetpotatoes.” Well of course they do.
- Good coffee AND conservation? I’ll take it.
- Soy AND conservation in Brazil? Well, not quite, but good news nonetheless.
- Cereal cultivation in Sudan pushed back several hundred years.
- What are the conditions for success in large-scale agricultural initiatives? You tell them.
- The history of crop improvement 101.
Brainfood: American pigs, Chinese cherries, Sustainable olive oil, Striga diversity, Low Cd durum, Amaranthus in Africa, Ramie core, Campania beans, Forage breeding overview
- Genetic characterization of local Criollo pig breeds from the Americas using microsatellite markers. 17 populations from 11 countries derive from 11 ancestral populations, with geographic clustering in some places but not in others.
- Physicochemical characterisation of four cherry species (Prunus spp.) grown in China. They’re all different.
- Extra-virgin olive oil production sustainability in northern Italy: a preliminary study. Not quite there yet.
- Genetic diversity of East and West African Striga hermonthica populations and virulence effects on a contrasting set of sorghum cultivars. Most of the variation in the parasite is within populations, but the most virulent populations are from Sudan.
- Assessing diversity in Triticum durum cultivars and breeding lines for high versus low cadmium content in seeds using the CAPS marker usw47. Durum accumulates toxic Cd more than other cereals, but some varieties are better than others, and there are DNA markers to tell you which they are.
- The Potential for Utilizing the Seed Crop Amaranth (Amaranthus spp.) in East Africa as an Alternative Crop to Support Food Security and Climate Change Mitigation. There is some.
- Development of a core collection for ramie by heuristic search based on SSR markers. 22 accessions is all you need to represent 108. Which doesn’t seem particularly useful given the total collection is over 2000.
- Morphological and genetic diversity among and within common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) landraces from the Campania region (Southern Italy). There is a bit, some of it even in agronomic traits.
- Forage Breeding for Changing Environments and Production Systems: an Overview. Summary of 4th International Symposium of Forage Breeding. If you want to include all trending topics in one study, apply genomic selection to breeding for persistence.
Nibbles: Farmers’ markets, Pacific news, Solanaceae news, Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, Tibetan barley, Rice roundup, David Lobell interview, Native American crops, Mesopotamian recipe, Insectophagy, Cities, Land purchases, Dormancy in evolution, Bad news from some crops, Good news from others, Creative Commons at Gates
- Hell of a week in the office again, so catching up on accumulated Nibbles on a Sunday. Because we’re here to serve.
- Cynical, funny take on farmers’ markets: “No, I don’t save seeds. That’s time-consuming nonsense for backyard gardeners. Yes, I’ve heard of Monsanto. I’m a farmer. I know about goddamn Monsanto.”
- Uncynical double from the Pacific: Samoa’s agricultural show and more detail on the aroid breeding work.
- High tech breeding of solanaceous crops. Nothing like this for aroids yet, alas. Yeah, but first you have to collect the little blighters.
- On the other hand, you also need an awareness of the past. Ask the Tibetans.
- And here’s kind of an example of that involving rice in India. Compare with that first Nibble: seed saving not just for backyard gardeners after all? Convinced? Go do it, no, really. Or read Bob Zeigler; you can listen to him too. We could go back and forward on this forever. I know: let’s get some data.
- And another example involving wild not-rice in the US and Canada. Though there are some things that haven’t survived quite as well among Native Americans as those wild rice recipes.
- And speaking of ancient recipes, here’s one from another wetland, far far away from the above.
- Yeah but not all ancient recipes are so resilient, take beetles for example.
- Urban farming is big, needs to be bigger.
- Meanwhile, agricultural land is being bought up all over the place, for what it’s worth, so maybe cities will be all we have to grow stuff.
- International Cocoa Organization calls bullshit on all those chocolate-is-running-out stories.
- Maybe we should chill about wine too? I dunno, I think I’d prefer to play it safe with both. Or get help from above. Or from the Fascists.
- The banana was going extinct too, wasn’t it?
- British apples (and other trees, to be sure) are of course perennially in trouble, but help is on the way, courtesy of Kew. And not just British or apples that get help from that quarter.
- “The potato will not only survive climate change, it will help us to survive it as well.” Good news at last.
- Mapping cassava, all of a sudden an exciting new crop, if you can believe it. No stopping it now that Bill Gates has called it the world’s most interesting vegetable.
- Incidentally, he’s also decided to go totally CC-BY.
- And that’s all she wrote. For now.