- Remembering Robin Graham, prophet of biofortification.
- Honouring plant breeder supreme Fred Blisss.
- Need to produce seed of all those new varieties that breeders come up with.
- And save the stuff they will replace: The Economist does the potatoes of Chiloé.
- Hey, it’s not just about the crops: conserving goats on farm in India.
- The experimental archaeology of bread thrives under corona. And if you were intrigued by the potato detoxification reference, find the details on Bill Schindler’s website. And not only bread and potatoes, also beer…
- Like Mozart’s oat beer? Which was apparently killed off by lager back in Austria but is now available in Denver.
- Food shouldn’t be cheap, it should be affordable, and not only for those who consume it. Ancient Egyptian bread will be exempted.
- No way Kenyan coffee can be described as cheap. h/t Jeremy’s newsletter: have you subscribed yet?
- I don’t know how cheap mungbean is in Myanmar, but it seems to be very valuable.
- The PNG singing dog is not extinct in the wild after all? Priceless.
- Combination of key and photo guide to the identification of European fungi. Worth its weight in truffles. Source.
Brainfood: Torres bananas, European Neolithic, Pleistocene dogs, Thai Neolithic, Amaranth domestication, Gluten trends, Perennial cereal, Resistant potatoes, Aridamerica, Ex situ mammals, AI, Zoonoses, Trade & diversity
- Multidisciplinary evidence for early banana (Musa cvs.) cultivation on Mabuyag Island, Torres Strait. Early as in 2000 years ago, which isn’t all that early compared to PNG. But opens possibility of mainland Aborigines being agriculturalists too, at least in the wet tropical NE.
- Climate shaped how Neolithic farmers and European hunter-gatherers interacted after a major slowdown from 6,100 BCE to 4,500 BCE. There was the most interaction between the two groups where Middle Eastern crops came to the limit of their climatic adaptation.
- The first evidence for Late Pleistocene dogs in Italy. Those hunter gatherers had dogs.
- Three thousand years of farming strategies in central Thailand. Millet first, then rice, but initially still rainfed. No word on whether anyone had dogs.
- Parallel Seed Color Adaptation during Multiple Domestication Attempts of an Ancient New World Grain. 3 grain amaranth domesticated species from one wild ancestor, with selection for white seeds in common.
- Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) Breeding from 1891 to 2010 Contributed to Increasing Yield and Glutenin Contents but Decreasing Protein and Gliadin Contents. No evidence of increasing immunostimulatory potential in German wheat varieties.
- ‘MN‐Clearwater’, the first food‐grade intermediate wheatgrass (Kernza perennial grain) cultivar. Perennial is good, sure, but is it low in gluten?
- Screening of wild potatoes identifies new sources of late blight resistance. All plants in about 10% of 384 wild potato accessions were resistant.
- An Aridamerican model for agriculture in a hotter, water scarce world. 17 genera have highest potential to be used in polyculture to improve agricultural resilience, human health, and community prosperity in the face of climate change.
- Ex situ management as insurance against extinction of mammalian megafauna in an uncertain world. Fancy maths can tell you were genebanks could do the most good.
- Machine learning: A powerful tool for gene function prediction in plants. Very fancy maths can help you predict phenotype from genotype, and much more besides.
- Zoonotic host diversity increases in human-dominated ecosystems. Oh we are in so much trouble.
- Global changes in crop diversity: Trade rather than production enriches supply. Well, actually, a bit of both.
Brainfood: Seeds & corona, Bleeding finance, Maiz de humedo, High altitude maize, Open data, Seed swapping, Wheat core, Banana epigenetics, Soil biodiversity, Ethiopian mustard diversity, Ryegrass GWAS, Peanut antioxidants, CWR conservation, VRR
- Seed security response during COVID-19: building on evidence and orienting to the future. First and foremost, support farmers save their seeds.
- Blended finance for agriculture: exploring the constraints and possibilities of combining financial instruments for sustainable transitions. How about supporting farmers save their seeds?
- Dynamic conservation of genetic resources: Rematriation of the maize landrace Jala. Genebanks helping farmers save their seeds.
- Molecular Parallelism Underlies Convergent Highland Adaptation of Maize Landraces. Early farmers saving their maize seeds in the Mexican highlands eventually helped out farmers in the Andean highlands. With GIF goodness.
- Open access to genetic sequence data maximizes value to scientists, farmers, and society. How will it help farmers save their seeds?
- Applying Knowledge of Southern Seed Savers to Community-Based Agricultural Biodiversity Conservation Practice. The people saving and swapping seeds in the Ozarks respond to films, need how-to manuals, and could be a tad more diverse. I suspect this is not just true in Arkansas.
- Characterization of wheat germplasm conserved in the Indian National Genebank and establishment of a composite core collection. Farmers trying to save their seeds rejoice.
- Heritable epigenetic diversity for conservation and utilization of epigenetic germplasm resources of clonal East African Highland banana (EAHB) accessions. Hey, it’s not just seeds. Methylation patterns follow geography but not morphology in a genetically uniform group of vegetatively propagated cultivars.
- Blind spots in global soil biodiversity and ecosystem function research. Not now, soil biodiversity, I’m too busy dealing with seeds.
- Narrow genetic base shapes population structure and linkage disequilibrium in an industrial oilseed crop, Brassica carinata A. Braun. Landraces of Ethiopian mustard and improved lines cluster in separate groups, but overall diversity is low. Not enough seeds saved, perhaps?
- High-Throughput Genome-Wide Genotyping To Optimize the Use of Natural Genetic Resources in the Grassland Species Perennial Ryegrass (Lolium perenne L.). Only possible because of saved seeds.
- Presence of resveratrol in wild Arachis species adds new value to this overlooked genetic resource. I hope we’ve saved enough seeds.
- Main Challenges and Actions Needed to Improve Conservation and Sustainable Use of Our Crop Wild Relatives. It’s quite difficult — and insufficient — to save the seeds of wild species, but we should do it nevertheless.
- Influence of diversity and intensification level on vulnerability, resilience and robustness of agricultural systems. Why we should all save seeds.
Beating a (cassava) virus in SE Asia
CMD being Cassava Mosaic Disease, one of the most damaging of crop viruses. The question, and photo, come from a recent tweet from a regional team coordinated by the entity formerly known as CIAT that is trying to develop “sustainable solutions to cassava disease in SE Asia” with support from ACIAR and CGIAR’s Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas.
Some of the resistant varieties that are doing so well in the photo are identified elsewhere in the thread as the IITA lines TME3, TMEB419, TMS980581, TMS980505 and TMS920057.
But this PowerPoint from Dr Xiaofei Zhang explains that those were only the beginning. Additional promising material came from a bunch of other sources.
Brainfood: Niche modelling, Post-2020 double, CC & productivity, Wild cacao, Popcorn data, Regulations, Duplicates, Oz ag, Kenya diversity, Stressed wheat, DUS, Connectivity, Population differentiation
- ntbox: an R package with graphical user interface for modeling and evaluating multidimensional ecological niches. Yes, another one, deal with it.
- Global targets that reveal the social–ecological interdependencies of sustainable development. The post-2020 framework should not have separate targets for social and ecological outcomes.
- Integrating agroecological production in a robust post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. Case in point?
- The Historical Impact of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Global Agricultural Productivity. We’ve lost a decade of productivity growth since 1961.
- Exploring the diversity and distribution of crop wild relatives of cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) in Colombia. Habitat protection needed.
- The Global Popcorn Project. Here comes the data! And more.
- Editorial: Leeway to Operate With Plant Genetic Resources. Research Topic on ABS, biosafety and IPR regulations and how they affect use of PGR.
- SNP Markers and Evaluation of Duplicate Holdings of Brassica oleracea in Two European Genebanks. Out of 10 pairs of accessions with similar names in the Russian and Nordic genebanks, 5 showed genetic differences, and 3 of these also morphological differences.
- History of crop introductions, breeding and selection in Australia: The 140 years from 1788. But at what cost?
- The welfare effects of crop biodiversity as an adaptation to climate shocks in Kenya. Crop diversity mitigates income variability risk caused by climate.
- Genetics of yield, abiotic stress tolerance and biofortification in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). Well that seems sorted then.
- Is plant variety registration keeping pace with speed breeding techniques? No?
- Global Cropland Connectivity: A Risk Factor for Invasion and Saturation by Emerging Pathogens and Pests. Nice maps of ease of movement among different cultivation areas of vegetatively propagated crops. Could be used to model movement of genetic resources as well as of pests/diseases?
- Global patterns of population genetic differentiation in seed plants. More population differentiation for tropical, mixed‐mating, non‐woody species pollinated by small insects, and lower for temperate, outcrossing trees pollinated by wind. Could perhaps be mashed up with this fragmentation database.