- Climate change is sending people to genebanks…
- …and leading to their holdings being used in lots of different and interesting ways.
- Collections of wild potatoes will surely be very useful…
- …for projects such a this, for example.
- And there’s also taro leaf blight to see to…
- …as well as trees important to Indigenous people to be conserved.
Brainfood: Green Revolution narratives, Soybean diversity, Wild barley diversity, Maize and bean breeding, Rice breeding, Apple pedigrees, Trees and diets, ICRISAT genebank, IITA genebank, GHUs, CGIAR policy, Diverse farming, De novo domestication
- Epic narratives of the Green Revolution in Brazil, China, and India. Symbols, heroes, heritage-making and we-will-do-it-even-better-next-time in the service of self-preservation and self-assertion. But, as we shall see below, not everything needs to be an epic success to be interesting, and useful.
- Using landscape genomics to infer genomic regions involved in environmental adaptation of soybean genebank accessions. Analysis of USDA collection shows that many haplotypes associated with high-latitude cold tolerance in China are still absent from modern American and European cultivars.
- Phenotypic evolution of the wild progenitor of cultivated barley (Hordeum vulgare L. subsp. spontaneum (K. Koch) Thell.) across bioclimatic regions in Jordan. Re-collecting after 23 years shows some loss of phenotypic diversity.
- Decades of Cultivar Development: A Reconciliation of Maize and Bean Breeding Projects and Their Impacts on Food, Nutrition Security, and Income of Smallholder Farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. Much done, much remains to be done.
- Genetic Trends Estimation in IRRIs Rice Drought Breeding Program and Identification of High Yielding Drought-Tolerant Lines. Progress, but not fast enough.
- A new method to reconstruct the direction of parent-offspring duo relationships using SNP array data and its demonstration on ancient and modern cultivars in the outcrossing species Malus × domestica. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell which variety is the parent and which the offspring.
- What are the links between tree-based farming and dietary quality for rural households? A review of emerging evidence in low- and middle-income countries. Meta-analysis shows that trees can help with diets, but it depends on a lot of things.
- Genebanks and market participation: evidence from groundnut farmers in Malawi. Improved peanut varieties derived from genebank accessions encourage market participation by farmers through expanding the area under cultivation, but not the amount sold.
- IITA’s genebank, cowpea diversity on farms, and farmers’ welfare in Nigeria. Improved varieties derived from genebank accessions don’t push out landrace diversity and are associated with higher yields and other benefits to farmers.
- The role of CGIAR Germplasm Health Units in averting endemic crop diseases: the example of rice blast in Bangladesh. The IRRI Germplasm Health Unit contributed about 2% to the benefits of the rice blast resistance breeding programme, but that’s a cost:benefit ratio of 112.
- Policy directions in public agricultural research: CGIAR’s public goods mandate and plant genetic resources. There has been too much focus on the “global” bit of “global public goods,” and opportunities have thus apparently been missed. The three papers above would like a word though.
- Landscape complexity and functional groups moderate the effect of diversified farming on biodiversity: A global meta-analysis. Diverse farming systems are better for both agricultural production and biodiversity.
- Breeding future crops to feed the world through de novo domestication. Ah yes, we will do it better this time.
Brainfood: Kungas, Tomato domestication, Wild honeybees, Association mapping, Mixtures, Wild edible plants, DSI ABS, Fusarium wilt, Mango weeds, Conservation payments
- The genetic identity of the earliest human-made hybrid animals, the kungas of Syro-Mesopotamia. According to 4500 year old DNA, these super-donkeys were sterile crosses between female domestic donkeys and wild male asses. I guarantee nothing below will be as much fun as this.
- Haplotype analyses reveal novel insights into tomato history and domestication driven by long-distance migrations and latitudinal adaptations. I was wrong. Turns out tomatoes came about by one wild species evolving into a semi-domesticated one during a gradual migration from the Peruvian deserts to the Mexican rainforests and that fully domesticated Peruvian and Ecuadorian populations were the result of more recent back-migrations.
- Semi-natural habitats promote winter survival of wild-living honeybees in an agricultural landscape. Wrong again. Rare wild honeybees have been found in Galician power poles.
- High-resolution association mapping with libraries of immortalized lines from ancestral landraces. Actually, immortal landraces sound pretty cool too.
- From cultivar mixtures to allelic mixtures: opposite effects of allelic richness between genotypes and genotype richness in wheat. Mixtures of inbred lines are generally better than pure stands for coping with blotch disease, but sometimes specific allelic combinations undermine this. Well, ancient super-donkeys it ain’t, but still.
- Local communities’ perceptions of wild edible plant and mushroom change: A systematic review. The literature shows that local people are worried about the decreased abundance of the wild plants they rely on for food and nutrition security.
- Weeds Enhance Pollinator Diversity and Fruit Yield in Mango. That should be “weeds.” They’re not weeds if they’re actually useful. Maybe some of them are even edible.
- Multilateral benefit-sharing from digital sequence information will support both science and biodiversity conservation. We need a multilateral DSI benefit-sharing system which decouples access to DSI from sharing the benefits of DSI use. Where have I heard that before? And can I hear more about ancient hybrid super-donkeys instead?
- Diversity of Fusarium associated banana wilt in northern Viet Nam. The dreaded TR4 is still rare, but the pathogen lurks among the wild species too.
- Payments for Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources in Agriculture: One Size Fits All? I wonder what size would fit a hybrid super-donkey.
Nibbles: Zimbabwe breeder, Indian genebank, Zambian genebank, Chinese genebank, Pakistan & Uzbekistan, Manchester planting
- Sorghum and millet breeder honoured in Zimbabwe. Always good to see.
- Germplasm evaluation efforts of Indian national genebank make it into the mainstream financial press. Also very good to see.
- Zambian national genebank does some much-needed safety duplication. More good news.
- Possibly good news, hard to say: Russian news agency on what seems to be a new wild rice genebank in China.
- Always good news to see two countries agree to collaborate on genetic resources.
- Manchester viaduct gets a greenlift. Good to see it, despite no genebanks being involved.
White strawberry privileged
Great piece from the always reliable Gastro Obscura on Chile’s white strawberry. It truly has all the canonical agrobiodiversity tropes: interdependence for diversity, the importance of wild relatives, the downside of reforestation, genetic erosion and how chefs can help. Oh, and biopiracy. The only thing that’s missing, in fact, is genebanks. Can’t have everything. But it could be used to teach the subject.