- 10,000,000 pages of biodiversity: among them 84 articles on agriculture.
- The road to scientific expertise for Maryam Imbumi began with a stomach ache.
- It’s wasp versus wasp to save native wiliwili.
- Domesticating big fish in the Amazon. Really big.
- Indian institute churning out salt-tolerant varieties.
Overexploiting crop wild relatives?
One of the seven plants studied in a recent IUCN report on overexploitation of wild medicinal plants in India is in a genus (Dioscorea) with a number of cultivated species. How many wild medicinal plants worldwide could also be classed as crop wild relatives?
Nibbles: Radishes, Fungi, Genomics, Bagel, Eels, Barack Hussein, Pomegranate
- Vavilov does radishes.
- “How would you describe the smell and taste of a fresh white truffle?“
- “The gene … is in an identity crisis.”
- “The basic roll-with-a-hole concept is centuries old.”
- “He slid her gently into a nylon sack and hung her from a scale on which she clocked two kilograms, then slid her out and into the V of a varnished plywood measuring board, where she lay quietly, like a metre-long slab of tenderloin.”
- “Activists” buttonhole Obama.
- The Afghan pomegranate to hit supermarket shelves.
Mine’s a decaff
We’re always on the look-out for examples of the financial value of germplasm collections which don’t involve some obscure and faraway disease, however nasty. So it was really nice to come across a great story about the search for naturally low-caffeine coffee, and in the Wall Street Journal no less. Coincidentally, there was also a blog post yesterday about the wild coffees of Madagascar. 1 Some of the many species found on that island are known to have low caffeine levels, but “[a]ttempts to transfer the caffeine-free property from wild coffee species of Madagascar, which produce an inferior beverage, to C. arabica have failed owing to a strong genetic barrier.”
LATER: I wonder if the recent Korean “land-grab” in Madagascar will have an effect on wild coffees and other interesting endemics.
Nibbles: Food, Potatoes, Medicine, Bees, Beer, Food miles, Fungi, Fruits cubed
- “Food is the most cost-effective intervention.”
- Peru promotes potatoes.
- The Importance of Biodiversity to Medicine. Anyone got access? Any mention of nutrition?
- EU Says bees should rest. Problem solved.
- Extreme beer. All problems solved.
- Eat local? I don’t think so.
- Itchy Italian gourmands gutted over climate change-caused truffle troubles.
- Mulberry trees pay the price for immodesty.
- While fig trees planted by Jesuits survive. It’s a funny old world. Fruit tree trifecta in play.
- And it comes in! Today’s saving-the-frigging-English-apple story comes to you from The Guardian. Enough already, the English apple is going to be fine.