Category: Tourism

• Developing country demand for crop germplasm conserved by the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System. 5 years, 10 crops, 100,000 samples.
• cacGMS: An Algorithm Cluster Germplasm based on Categorical Genetic Traits. Build a better cluster algorithm for categorical descriptors and the world will beat a path to your genebank. If it isn’t already.
• Deep learning: as the new frontier in high-throughput plant phenotyping. A really fancy way of scoring those descriptors.
• Selection of duplicates of flax accessions – an important task in the management of collection of genetic resources of Linum usitatissimum L. But you can do a lot with passport data.
• Mining for allelic gold: finding genetic variation in photosynthetic traits in crops and wild relatives. Let the gene editing begin!
• Expanding the genetic variation of Brassica juncea by introgression of the Brassica rapa genome. AABB gets a shot of AA.
• Adaptive potential of Coffea canephora from Uganda in response to climate change. Some populations are going to do better than others under climate change. Ah, but are they the best populations for other traits?
• Pre-domestication bottlenecks of the cultivated seaweed Gracilaria chilensis. Founder effect and over-exploitation mean that more diversity from New Zealand might be needed.
• Genomic consequences of domestication of the Siamese fighting fish. You don’t need huge genetic diversity to get huge phenotypic diversity, even with strong selection. But will new diversity be needed eventually? From Siam?
• Food versus wildlife: Will biodiversity hotspots benefit from healthier diets? Some hotspots will actually do worse if people eat better, so we will have to look at better agriculture too. Including seaweed, for all I know.
• Commodity crops in biodiversity-rich production landscapes: Friends or foes? The example of cotton in the Mid Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe. Possibly an example of the above. Cotton was better for wildlife than what came after prices dropped.