- The latest on TR4 resistant banana varieties in Australia.
- Lactobacillus is in fact 25 genera.
- Greenhouse tomatoes pretty diverse after all?
- Digitaria: from weed to forage.
- London’s mulberries.
Nibbles: Alert edition
- Book alert: Biodiversity, Food and Nutrition — A New Agenda for Sustainable Food Systems.
- Thread alert: Monumental analysis of crop yield trends in the USA.
- Woke alert: WorldVeg ticks a lot of boxes with its work on a peppers core collection.
- Policy alert: Why haven’t farmers’ varieties found a place in national and global seed markets?
Nibbles: Online courses, Colombian seeds, California grapes, Living lockdown
- Online courses on plant-related stuff.
- Beautiful catalog of Colombian heritage seeds.
- California mission grapes came from Peru, not Mexico.
- Taking care of living collections under coronavirus lockdown.
Nibbles: Olives, Figs, Columbian Exchange, Flour, landraces Newsletter, DOIs
- Is there any doubt that olives are important?
- Or figs, for that matter.
- Spanish botanical garden exhibit on Latin American plants that changed the European diet. Stunning.
- Old mills making a comeback.
- Latest issue of the Landraces newsletter from Farmer’s Pride. See also here for previous issues.
- Huge PDF on DOIs in genebanks.
Brainfood: Shiny seeds, Mexican maize, Olive plague, Pulse CWR, Climate change & biodiversity, Soybean diversity, Wild tomato, Brassica evaluation, Horizontal gene transfer, Wild Cajanus, Agroforestry benefits, Fishy diets, Symbiosis, Ancient Amazonia, Animal domestication
- Delayed luminescence of seeds: are shining seeds viable? Maybe, but more research needed.
- Explaining the spatial scale of campesino agriculture in Mexico: Implications for the supply and conservation of native maize. Maize is not just for subsistence; never has been.
- Impact of Xylella fastidiosa subspecies pauca in European olives. Fancy maths says olives are doomed. But we knew that, right?
- Potential and limits of exploitation of crop wild relatives for pea, lentil, and chickpea improvement. Amazingly, still more collecting is needed.
- The projected timing of abrupt ecological disruption from climate change. And this is why.
- The climatic association of population divergence and future extinction risk of Solanum pimpinellifolium. Its range may expand in some places, shrink in others. so it’s not like all bad news then? At least you know where to collect it from.
- Early Holocene crop cultivation and landscape modification in Amazonia. REALLY early agriculture in the Llanos de Moxos. Any collecting there, I wonder?
- Exploring the genetic base of the soybean germplasm from Africa, America and Asia as well as mining of beneficial allele for flowering and seed weight. The African material is not very diverse, but is very different
- Novel Source of Biotic Stress Resistance Identified from Brassica Species and its Wild Relatives. From 3000 to about 10 “useful” accessions.
- Horizontal gene transfer of Fhb7 from fungus underlies Fusarium head blight resistance in wheat. Thinopyrum elongatum got head blight resistance from the fungus Epichloë. GMOs unimpressed.
- A Wild Cajanus scarabaeoides (L.), Thouars, IBS 3471, for Improved Insect-Resistance in Cultivated Pigeonpea. It has multiple disease resistance mechanisms against pod borer. And here it is.
- A Planetary Health Perspective on Agroforestry in Sub-Saharan Africa. Trees on farms are good for you. Here come the data.
- Dietary diversity and fish consumption of mothers and their children in fisher households in Komodo District, eastern Indonesia. Infants and young children are not getting enough of all the fish.
- Agriculture and the Disruption of Plant–Microbial Symbiosis. Agronomy, ecology and breeding can screw up microbial symbioses in cultivated plants, and that’s not good. But it is expected.
- Animal domestication in the era of ancient genomics. “By documenting how livestock populations endured both past epidemics and environmental change, ancient genomics can provide invaluable information that can be used to address current and future societal challenges.” Can.