- China’s largest genebank just got a little bit larger. And some context.
- Small Pennsylvania genebank may get a lot smaller.
- Denmark shows the way on seed saving in Europe.
- Chocolate really got around.
- Coffee didn’t do too badly either. But home is where the heart is.
- More pix of wheat wild relatives than you can shake a stick at.
Nibbles: Strampelli, Gender, State of World’s Plants, Wild peanuts, Istambul gardens, ICRAF & CIFOR DG chat, Biofortification, Cowpea genome, SSEx Q&A, Rice resilience, Cacao & coffee microbiome, Mapping crops, BBC Discovery, EU seed law
- “È curioso che il grano Cappelli, ora diventato un simbolo della “pasta da gourmet”, fosse una volta il comune grano della pasta di tutti i giorni, e che venga da alcuni considerato “autoctono” quando in realtà è una varietà tunisina.” Curious indeed.
- A woman’s crop? Not as straightforward as it may sound.
- State of the World’s Plants symposium, 11-12 May.
- Above will no doubt consider crop wild relatives such as the peanut’s.
- More on the urban vegetable gardens of Istanbul.
- Tree DGs in the garden getting coffee. On International Forest Day.
- The “Bernie Sanders” vision of biofortification.
- Cowpea to get a genome.
- Q&A with John Torgrimson of Seed Savers Exchange.
- The resilience of rice: “You never find a crop that can span this latitude and altitude.” Really? Wheat?
- Cacao and coffee have a microbial terroir.
- Crop mixes are geographically stable.
- Prof. Kathy Willis of Kew on Feeding the World, including using crop wild relatives. IRRI Kew genebanks featured.
- Denmark interprets EU law to allow seed saving.
AVGRIS revamped
The World Vegetable Center has come up with a redesigned front-end for presenting data on its germplasm collection to the world.
The AVRDC Vegetable Genetic Resources Information System (AVGRIS) is an information system that manages the data of all vegetable germplasm conserved in the AVRDC genebank. The Genetic Resources and Seed Unit uses this system to efficiently manage genebank operations. AVGRIS links all germplasm conservation and management operations, from registration, characterization, evaluation and seed inventory to seed distribution to end-users.
Check it out. And before you ask, no, I looked, and Varrone is not there.
A tomato comes back home
The return to its native land of an historic tomato variety developed by the famous wheat breeder Nazareno Strampelli is making a splash in Italy. Originally published in the rather specialized organ L’Iformatore Agrario, the news has now been picked up by the more mainstream media, at least regionally.
What’s particularly interesting to us here is that Varrone, as the variety is called, was eventually found in the genebank of the Vavilov Institute, in St Petersburg, Russia.
“It is a small tribute to the memory of Strampelli on his 150th birthday: from tomorrow it will be possible to eat spaghetti Cappelli-Varrone, 100% Strampelli, not only for the durum wheat but also for the tomato sauce,” says Roberto Papa, professor of agricultural genetics at the Università Politecnica delle Marche, who coordinated the research in collaboration with Sergio Salvi, biologist and biographer of Strampelli, and Giovanna Attene professor of agricultural genetics at the Università di Sassari.
The durum wheat variety Senatore Cappelli was also bred by Strampelli in the 1910s, and remained popular for decades. I’m sure Strampelli would have been pleased that his tomato has been found. Not so sure what he would have thought about losing it in the first place.
Brainfood: Chinese royal jelly, Diverse wine yeasts, Heirloom values, Oil and biodiversity, Grassland management, Maize and culture, Minimum viable populations, Good coffee
- High Royal Jelly-Producing Honeybees (Apis mellifera ligustica) (Hymenoptera: Apidae) in China. China supplies 90% of the global market?
- Taking Advantage of Natural Biodiversity for Wine Making: The WILDWINE Project. Back to the future, via yeast diversity.
- Conservation of Landrace: The Key Role of the Value for Agrobiodiversity Conservation. An Application on Ancient Tomatoes Varieties. Fancy maths shows farmer maintaining heirloom tomato variety in Perugia could be charging more.
- Are changes in global oil production influencing the rate of deforestation and biodiversity loss? Less oil production, more agricultural expansion, more biodiversity loss.
- Grazing vs. mowing: A meta-analysis of biodiversity benefits for grassland management. Grazing. Probably. The data sucks.
- Maize diversity associated with social origin and environmental variation in Southern Mexico. Ethnicity trumps altitude in genetic patterning. Morphology is all over the place.
- Genetics in conservation management: Revised recommendations for the 50/500 rules, Red List criteria and population viability analyses. One we missed. 100/1000 is the new 50/500. Multiply by 10 for census population sizes to avoid inbreeding and retain evolutionary potential, respectively.
- Advances in genomics for the improvement of quality in Coffee. We’ll need to sequence the wild species too.