- It’s pretty rare to have a mainstream media piece on the use of crop wild relatives for climate change adaptation but here we have an example with tomato, so make the most of it. There’s an interesting wrinkle though, so more to come, time permitting.
- It’s even rarer to see a mainstream media piece on genebank staff getting trained. What’s going on out there?
- Not exactly mainstream media, but how many times have you seen an official government press release on its livestock censuses? Anyway, India’s last one was carried out in 2019 and covered 184 breeds of 16 species. Wonder where the data is.
- Speaking of government press releases, here’s one from USDA announcing that it has joined a coffee breeding network. Well, I for one think it’s important.
- And staying in the USA, you know how you read in mainstream textbooks that Native Americans got horses from retreating Spanish colonists after the Pueblo Revolt? And you know how Native Americans have been saying that’s not what they think happened? How rare is it that a scientific paper involving Indigenous authors overturns a mainstream historical narrative and is splashed all over the mainstream media? Very rare, that’s how rare.
Brainfood: Traits & environment, Acacia growth, Local extinction risk, Lebanese CWR priorities, Malawi CWR payments, Bread wheat origins, Wild lettuce, Ethiopian forages, Editing forages
- Why can’t we predict traits from the environment? Because plants are not collections of independent, isolated traits. All the more reason to study, understand and protect wild plants of economic importance, as the following papers show.
- Differential climatic conditions drive growth of Acacia tortilis tree in its range edges in Africa and Asia. Case in point of the above. Makes germplasm evaluation really hard.
- Understanding local plant extinctions before it is too late: bridging evolutionary genomics with global ecology. Modelling based on the genomic offset (GO) method and the mutations–area relationship (MAR) can help better predict the risk of extinction of different populations.
- Crop wild relatives in Lebanon: mapping the distribution of Poaceae and Fabaceae priority taxa for conservation planning. Bekaa and Baalbak have the highest diversity and the SW the most gaps.
- Community-Level Incentive Mechanisms for the Conservation of Crop Wild Relatives: A Malawi Case Study. Paying communities to conserve crop wild relatives could work and be relatively cheap. Waiting to see this being applied in the Bekaa.
- Population genomics unravels the Holocene history of bread wheat and its relatives. Yeah but crop wild relatives really held back bread wheat domestication. So maybe the Bekaa owes everyone else.
- New insights gained from collections of wild Lactuca relatives in the gene bank of the Institute of Evolution, University of Haifa. Maybe they can gain an insight into how to make lettuce taste of something. And I wonder what environmental variable that will be associated with.
- Climate change and land-use change impacts on future availability of forage grass species for Ethiopian dairy systems. Two forages will do better under climate change, one worse. Assuming a lot of stuff.
- Application of CRISPR/Cas9 technology in forages. But plants are not collections of independent, isolated traits, right?
Nibbles: Food tree, Wild chocolate, Cacao, Cassava in Africa, Indigenous ABS, Abbasid food, Valuing trees
- Gastropod episode on The Fruit that Could Save the World. Any guesses what that might be?
- Atlas Obscura podcast on an apparently now famous wild-harvested chocolate from Bolivia. But how wild is it really?
- BBC podcast on cacao for balance.
- Forbes touts an African cassava revolution. What, no podcast?
- Very interesting piece from the ever reliable Modern Farmer on how a small seed company called Fedco Seeds designated a bunch of maize landraces as “indigenously stewarded,” and are paying 10% of what they make from the sale of their seeds to a pooled Indigenous fund which goes to support a local, multi-tribal project called Nibezun. A sort of mini-MLS? Definitely worth a podcast. Any takers?
- A long but rewarding article in New Lines Magazine describes medieval cookbooks from the Abbasid caliphate. The recipes make up for the somewhat stilted podcast.
- BGCI publication on how the Morton Arboretum works out whether it should be growing a particular population or species of tree. The trick is to quantify 5 types of “value”: environmental, evolutionary, genetic diversity, horticultural, conservation. Though one could also consider hostorical/cultural, educational and economic value as well. I suspect in the end it comes down to whether it looks nice in an available gap. If I were to do a podcast on this, I’d test it out with the tree in the first of these Nibbles.
What will AI ever do for us?
Ever since ChatGPT hit the internet a few weeks ago AI has been all over what we are now obliged to call the discourse, so I figured I’d wade in. Jumping in right at the deep end, I asked it the following: Which barley genebank accessions are the most drought tolerant? Here’s what I got.
Determining the most drought-tolerant barley genebank accessions would require a comprehensive analysis of multiple factors, such as yield performance, physiological traits, genetic diversity, and environmental adaptation. However, there are some barley genebank accessions that have been reported to exhibit high levels of drought tolerance based on various studies and evaluations. Here are a few examples:
- CI 9835: This barley accession from Ethiopia has shown high levels of drought tolerance in several studies. It has been found to maintain high yields and exhibit drought avoidance traits such as early maturity and reduced plant height.
- Himalaya 10: This Indian barley accession has demonstrated good drought tolerance and yield stability in multiple environments. It has also been found to possess traits such as deep rooting, reduced stomatal conductance, and high water use efficiency.
- Hordeum vulgare L. subsp. spontaneum: This wild barley subspecies from Israel has been found to possess high levels of genetic diversity and adaptability to harsh environments, including drought-prone areas. It has also been shown to possess traits such as deep roots, reduced leaf area, and efficient water uptake.
These are just a few examples, and there are likely many other barley genebank accessions that exhibit high levels of drought tolerance. The specific characteristics that contribute to drought tolerance can vary depending on the accession and the environment, so it is important to evaluate multiple traits and consider multiple environments when assessing drought tolerance in barley genebank accessions.
I mean, that’s not too bad I guess, as far as it goes. CI 9835 is a bona fide genebank accession, and it is from Ethiopia. But I can’t locate a study which highlighted it as being particularly drought tolerant. Himalaya 10 is an elite hulless barley, not a genebank accessions, and from Tibet rather than India, but it does seem to be drought tolerant. As for wild barley, some accessions do have potential.
I then tried Consensus, which is a sort of AI-driven Google Scholar type thing. Like Scholar, it returned a bunch of papers evaluating different barleys for drought tolerance, which one could obviously scour for specific accessions. But, intriguingly, it also provides a sort of summary of what it found:
These studies suggest that STI, GMP, MP indices, two wild Iranian genotypes, and early seedling stage accessions are the most drought-tolerant barley genebank accessions.
Which unfortunately is not much use, let’s be honest. For now. It’s in beta, so it will no doubt get better.
So someone tackling the problem from scratch has a place to start, but clearly what we need next is a way to apply AI directly to genebank databases. Or even for AI to understand a bit better what a genebank accessions is.
Brainfood: Human diversity, Wild rye, Caribbean cassava, Three Sisters, Old beer, Old apples, Feral crops, Crop resynthesis
- Palaeogenomics of Upper Palaeolithic to Neolithic European hunter-gatherers. Farmers may have pushed hunter-gatherers to the northern edge of Europe while also in mixing with them.
- Identification and exploitation of wild rye (Secale spp.) during the early Neolithic in the Middle Euphrates valley. Those Europeans on the move — both farmers and hunter-gatherers — would have been familiar with wild rye, but that’s pretty much gone from the Fertile Crescent now.
- Caribbean Deep-Time Culinary Worlds Revealed by Ancient Food Starches: Beyond the Dominant Narratives. But enough about Europe. It wasn’t always all about cassava in the pre-colonial, and indeed colonial, Caribbean…
- Reuniting the Three Sisters: collaborative science with Native growers to improve soil and community health. …as there was also the maize/beans/squash system in that part of the world, and may well be again.
- Understanding Early Modern Beer: An Interdisciplinary Case-Study. Something else that could come back is early modern Irish beer, and I’d be there for that.
- Forgotten forest relics: Apple trees (Malus spp.) in eastern U.S. forests. Old abandoned orchards, and escapes therefrom, could have lots of interesting apple diversity. Early modern American cider, anyone?
- Building a feral future: Open questions in crop ferality. And it’s not just apples. It’s a whole movement in fact.
- Resynthesized Rapeseed (Brassica napus): Breeding and Genomics. Sure, we can rebuild it, we have the technology. But will it go feral on us again?