- The date palm has a red weevil problem, but FAO is on it.
- Refried beans.
- Sarada Krishnan on her life in coffee. If there’s good news for the crop, it’s partly because of her.
- Mangalitsa in Rome. Jeremy reports.
- ICBA joins the international genebank club. FAO is on it.
Brainfood: Australian pigs, EAHB breeding, Megafauna lunch, Women & agrotourism, Biodiversity & productivity, US beans, Potato ploidy, Phenotyping forests, Sudan cattle genomics, Botanic gardens, Pepper resources, Vanillin, CWR maintenance
- What does the ‘closed herd’ really mean for Australian breeding companies and their customers? Australia has enough pig diversity to be going on with.
- Crossbreeding East African Highland Bananas: Lessons Learnt Relevant to the Botany of the Crop After 21 Years of Genetic Enhancement. Not completely sterile, but hardly very fertile either. Hard row to hoe.
- Are we eating the world’s megafauna to extinction? Yes.
- A systematic map of evidence on the contribution of forests to poverty alleviation. Always like a map.
- Turismo Rural y Conservación Ambiental: La Participación de la Mujer Campesina en la Reserva de la Biosfera los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, Mexico. It would be a good idea.
- Not even wrong: The spurious measurement of biodiversity’s effects on ecosystem functioning. Biodiversity likely not as important for ecosystem productivity as previously thought, because maths.
- Evolution of SSR diversity from wild types to U.S. advanced cultivars in the Andean and Mesoamerican domestications of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). Some base-broadening may be called for.
- Comparison of Methods to Distinguish Diploid and Tetraploid Potato in Applied Diploid Breeding. Count chloroplasts.
- Phenotyping Whole Forests Will Help to Track Genetic Performance. You heard.
- Signatures of positive selection in African Butana and Kenana dairy zebu cattle. Adapted to marginal environments, but with potential for higher milk production.
- How cultivating wild plants in botanic gardens can change their genetic and phenotypic status and what it means for their conservation value. In the end, it’s a numbers game.
- Genetic Resources of Capsicum. Could use more wild relatives, more.
- Vanilla bahiana, a contribution from the Atlantic Forest biodiversity for the production of vanilla: A proteomic approach through high-definition nanoLC/MS. But does it taste the same?
- Spontaneous hybridisation within Aegilops collection and biobanking of crop wild relatives (CWR). I guess that’s bad. But could it be useful?
Nibbles: Fox burials, Myammar genebank, Wild rice, Community genebanks, Breeding cowpeas & EAH bananas, Doherty pics, Pulque ecotourism, Tree diversity maps, Horizontal genes, Polish hop breeding
- Did ancient Iberians domesticate foxes?
- Myanmar genebank staff receive training in Australia.
- Why genebanks are important. Though not so much for wild rice. No, not that wild rice, we’re talking Zizania here.
- Genebanks can be community-friendly.
- Improving cowpea and banana. Need genebanks for that.
- Picturing genebanks.
- Drinking for conservation.
- Mapping tree diversity.
- Some grasses steal genes from neighbours.
- Polish hops for Polish beer.
Brainfood: Sinotato, Photophenomics, Bangladesh lentils, Vernalization gene, Droning on, Pathogen identification, Human domestication, Citrus cryo, Purple rain, Teff diversity, Mining biodiversity lit, Wild dates, Buckwheat improvement, Panicum genome
- Potato and Food Security in China. Huge expansion, mainly due to product diversification, but still room for growth. But how will it end? Like bananas?
- Converging phenomics and genomics to study natural variation in plant photosynthetic efficiency. Chlorophyll fluorescence technologies are revolutionizing phenotyping. Now everyone will want another gadget.
- Is DNA fingerprinting the gold standard for estimation of adoption and impacts of improved lentil varieties? It’s not about yield.
- A florigen paralog is required for short-day vernalization in a pooid grass. Nope, I can’t say it better than the press release: Ancient gene duplication gave grasses multiple ways to wait out winter.
- Drones for Conservation in Protected Areas: Present and Future. Sure, why not. On-farm too?
- Genome-Enhanced Detection and Identification (GEDI) of plant pathogens. Sort of barcoding for bugs.
- Self-domestication in Homo sapiens: Insights from comparative genomics. There’s a domestication syndrome for humans too.
- Cryopreservation of Citrus limon (L.) Burm. F Shoot Tips Using a Droplet-vitrification Method. Well, at least two varieties work.
- Farmers Drive Genetic Diversity of Thai Purple Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Landraces. Well, who else?
- Genetic Diversity of Ethiopian Tef [(Eragrostis tef (Zucc.) Trotter] Released and Selected Farmers’ Varieties along with Two Wild Relatives as Revealed by Microsatellite Markers. The landraces are distinct from the released varieties, and more diverse.
- Biodiversity Observations Miner: A web application to unlock primary biodiversity data from published literature. Nice enough, but you need to upload a PDF corpus. Why not let it loose on the internet?
- Cross-species hybridization and the origin of North African date palms. I always knew that P. theophrasti would come in useful.
- Revisiting the versatile buckwheat: reinvigorating genetic gains through integrated breeding and genomics approach. Start with a database, core collection, and wild relatives. Gratifyingly old-fashioned.
- The genome of broomcorn millet. That would be Panicum miliaceum.
Nibbles: Magic beans et al., Avocado etymology, Honey please, Pig maps, Banana pics, Commons, Diet footprint, Sparing/sharing, Old caviar, Old whiskey, Potato wild relatives, Cassava breeding, Apple double, Ancient potatoes, Ancient grapes, African cooking, Native American craft beer, Agricultural heritage site, Aboriginal biodiversity, Svalbard 10th, Alpaca calendar.
- Telegraph op-ed on agricultural biodiversity. Yeah, you read that right.
- No, avocado does not come from the Aztec’s word for testicles. It’s the other way around.
- Why honey is a keeper.
- Mapping the hell out of pigs.
- Photo database to help tell bananas apart.
- Deconstructing the Tragedy of the Commons.
- The C footprint of your diet.
- “We can spare 50 percent and share the rest.”
- Cave man caviar.
- Whiskey with that?
- Potato wild relatives and food security.
- Cassava and food security. No word on its wild relatives.
- Wales finds a new apple.
- Maybe someone will take a cool picture of it.
- Potatoes were always for the masses. Ok, but not sure anyone ever thought otherwise, though.
- Grapes, on the other hand…
- The cuisines of Africa get their shot.
- Some of those will go well with craft beer.
- Agricultural heritage list gets saffron and argan. Bet they go together well.
- Maybe wild kiang tea will get there too someday.
- Or the Aboriginal Australians. Not really agriculturalists, but still.
- Is this alpaca exploitation? Maybe you can take the promotion of agricultural biodiversity too far.
- Will the Svalbard Global Seed Vault qualify one day? Ten years on, still going strong. And return to top.