- Characterizing the allopolyploid species among the wild relatives of soybean: Utility of reduced representation genotyping methodologies. Allopolyploids are more than the sum of their diploid progenitors, but also less.
- Genetic Diversity within a Global Panel of Durum Wheat (Triticum durum) Landraces and Modern Germplasm Reveals the History of Alleles Exchange. Modern varieties have a lot of rare alleles, and Ethiopian landraces may be the results of a separate domestication. But I’m not sure you can call this a core collection. Incidentally, genotyped by 35K Affymetrix Axiom wheat breeders array1 at TraitGenetics (Gatersleben, Germany).
- Genome Wide Association Study to Identify the Genetic Base of Smallholder Farmer Preferences of Durum Wheat Traits. Farmers know what they’re talking about. No word on any overlap with above. Incidentally, genotyped on the Infinium 90K wheat chip at TraitGenetics (Gatersleben, Germany). There’s a coincidence!
- The role of livestock intensification and landscape structure in maintaining tropical biodiversity. If we want to keep more livestock while maintaining biodiversity, we should spare forests and avoid using agrochemical inputs. Assuming that dung beetles can stand in for tropical biodiversity as a whole.
- Organic farming enhances soil microbial abundance and activity — A meta-analysis and meta-regression. Especially legumes in crop rotations and organic inputs.
- Identification of promising sources for fodder traits in the world collection of pearl millet at the ICRISAT genebank. From over 300 to about a dozen.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Brachiaria Species and Breeding Populations. Fancy molecular markers agree with morphology.
- Bottlenecks in the PGRFA use system: stakeholders’ perspectives. Need better policies, capacity and access.
- Solanum jamesii: Evidence for Cultivation of Wild Potato Tubers by Ancestral Puebloan Groups. But does it make good chips?
- Resistance to Sclerotinia sclerotiorum in wild Brassica species and the importance of Sclerotinia subarctica as a Brassica pathogen. Thanks to the U. of Warwick genebank.
- Genetic changes in a novel breeding population of Brassica napus synthesized from hundreds of crosses between B. rapa and B. carinata. Any of them resistant to Sclerotinia?
It’s a new bean, old bean!
Congratulations to Daniel Debouck, bean expert and erstwhile manager of the CIAT genebank, for having a new Phaseolus species named after him:
The specific epithet honours Daniel G. Debouck, given his scholarly contributions, and extensive and systematic collections of wild and domesticated Phaseolus throughout the Americas. He was the first to discover this species during a field expedition in Peru (Debouck 1989, 1990). Seeds from one of these collections (G 21245) were sent to UC Davis, where allozyme analyses provided evidence of their uniqueness, not fitting in either the Andean or wild Mesoamerican Phaseolus vulgaris. Based on these results, funding for additional explorations in Ecuador and Colombia, were granted. Further analyses on newly collected materials provided additional evidence from which earlier papers by Debouck et al. (1993) and Kami et al. (1995) evolved.
Brainfood: Kolli Hills diversity, Fergana diversity, Chinese rice terraces, ICRISAT prebreeding, Spanish CWR collecting, Edible flowers, Diversification, Prices vs volatility
- An ethnographic exploration of perceptions of changes in dietary variety in the Kolli Hills, India. Cassava cash cropping has had unforeseen effects on dietary diversity.
- Mapping and assessing crop diversity in the irrigated Fergana Valley, Uzbekistan. More crops on the edges.
- An Analysis on Crops Choice and Its Driving Factors in Agricultural Heritage Systems—A Case of Honghe Hani Rice Terraces System. Established for “red rice”, but that’s not enough.
- Prebreeding Using Wild Species for Genetic Enhancement of Grain Legumes at ICRISAT. It’s not easy, but it’s been worth it.
- A Multispecies Collecting Strategy for Crop Wild Relatives Based on Complementary Areas with a High Density of Ecogeographical Gaps. Collecting in Spain in “…top 10 selected complementary areas would allow the capture of 59 of the 88 targeted taxa and 31% of the 683 different taxa-ELC category combinations identified in the ecogeographical gaps.”
- Antioxidant power, anthocyanin content and organoleptic performance of edible flowers. Tycoon Blue will be quite the marketing challenge.
- Diversifying Food Systems in the Pursuit of Sustainable Food Production and Healthy Diets. And nary an edible flower mentioned.
- Cereal price shocks and volatility in sub-Saharan Africa: what really matters for farmers’ welfare? Prices.
Domesticating horsegram
The indefatigable Dorian Fuller has been even less fatigable than usual lately, with a couple of papers in the past few weeks on the history of the horsegram, Macrotyloma uniflorum. The first is a general review of the geographical, linguistic and archaeological evidence for the origins of the crop. They point to a long history in India and at least two separate domestications there.
The second is a much deeper dive into the history of domestication, using high resolution x-ray computed tomography with a synchrotron to measure non-destructively the decrease in seed coat thickness with time in archaeological remains of domesticated material. A thin seed coat is thought to be related to loss of dormancy, and hence part of the domestication syndrome. It had been suggested that rare non-dormant variants might have been selected during domestication, but the evidence from horsegram is that even the thick-coated, and therefore presumably still dormant, material was domesticated.
Which is all very interesting, but what I want to leave you with is a little quiz. Given that Kersting’s groundnut is now also in Macrotyloma, as M. geocarpum (Harms) Maréchal & Baudet, how many other con-generic species can you think of that were domesticated on separate continents? Apart from the two Oryza species, of course.
Measuring the success of botanical gardens
Good to see Botanic Gardens Conservation International first technical review online, entitled Defining the botanic garden, and how to measure performance and success.
The definition part turns out to be a compendium of “criteria useful in defining a botanic garden.” The performance measures are rather long lists of indicators in the following areas, ranked by the percentage of correspondents who agreed with each measure:
- Plant conservation
- Scientific research
- Collections
- Horticulture
- Public engagement and education
- Sustainability and ethics
- Business management and governance
Here’s the overall list:
Is there anything genebanks could learn from these?