- Survival seed bank in the news again. Must be Christmas.
- Turkish nibbles: wine, pictachios. That wine one will no doubt run and run.
- How to make sure nutrition gets a seat at the agricultural development table. And Danny breaks it down for ya.
- What leads to spurts in conservation effort? In situ only, but instructive.
- Sesame is big business in Ethiopia.
- Boffins find yet another bit of DNA that will save the world.
Conserving wild animals the hard way
With regard to … sperm collection from wild animals, FAO does not have guidelines on this, given our emphasis on domestic livestock. However, if the animal can be sacrificed, epididymal sperm collection may be an option. This procedure is briefly discussed in the FAO Guidelines for Cryoconservation of Animal (domestic) Genetic Resources (pages 99-100) (http://www.fao.org/docrep/016/i3017e/i3017e00.pdf) but some experimentation would likely be needed to adapt it to your species of choice. If the animal must remain alive, options may be to remove sperm from the testes by using a syringe (PESA — Percutaneous Epididymal Sperm Extraction), to surgically implant a catheter or by removal of only a single testicle for sperm collection, leaving the other intact. Two scientific documents on epididymal semen collection in livestock by Dr. Flavia Pizzi (one of the authors of the FAO Cryoconservation Guidelines) and her colleagues are available at:
ftp://DADnet:Mobile45@ext-ftp.fao.org/ag/reserved/dad-net/ReprDomAnim_epididimi2012.pdf (278 kb)
ftp://DADnet:Mobile45@ext-ftp.fao.org/ag/reserved/dad-net/PosterSLTB.pdf (870 kb)
For “conventional” sperm collection from living wild animals, an electro-ejaculator is often used, although this approach will not be successful for all species (e.g. it’s generally not used for pigs and horses among livestock species). In case your target species is wild cats, the following may be of use to you:
http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/31238/InTech-Wildlife_cats_reproductive_biotechnology.pdf
That’s from the always interesting DAD-Net. Makes me ever so very grateful the wild relatives I deal with are plants.
Nibbles: Sesamum publications, Organic China, Melaku Worede biopic, Pre-breeding smackdown, Price of spice, Pineapple breeding
- A bibliography of sesame. Good to have.
- All you want to know about organic farming in China. Who knows when it might come in useful.
- The legacy of Melaku Worede. Proud to know him.
- European pre-breeding meeting. Would be good to go.
- The Spice Trade 2.0. Good gig if you can get it.
- Coconut-tasting pineapple. Why?
Nibbles: Desert afforestation, Breadfruit, Sustainable tea, Biofortification, Cassava breeding, Wheat breeding, Ancient microbrewery
- The Sahara Forest Project: what could possibly go wrong?
- Maybe they should try breadfruit. Or avocados. Or ask this guy for advice.
- Not for all the sustainable tea in China!
- Or all the high-Fe pearl millet in India.
- Or all the wild chickens in South Asia.
- Cassava gets the genomic selection treatment. Maybe wheat too?
- Did someone mention beer?
Brainfood: Bumper bonanza, Old peas, Irrigated meadows, Cereal mashes, Medicinal plants, Diversity and production, Millet gaps, Seed ageing, Flax core
- First off — a pretty big deal. Taylor & Francis have made a bunch of papers related to sustainable agriculture freely available, but only until the end of December. Happy whatever holiday won’t offend you.
- Twentieth-century changes in the genetic composition of Swedish field pea metapopulations. Metapopulations have become isolated populations. In genebanks.
- Effects of different irrigation systems on the biodiversity of species-rich hay meadows. Change from the traditional irrigation system has affected biodiversity levels, but not a huge amount.
- Research regarding the use of wheat biodiversity for obtaining some cereal-based fermented mashes. Let’s go straight to what we need to know here: the best mash come from spelt wheat. Oh, to be the one doing the organoleptic characterization.
- Cultivation and high capitalization of medicinal and aromatic plants in the Romanian-Bulgarian cross-border region. If you’re really interested, there’s a database that brings it all together.
- Crop biodiversity, productivity and production risk: Panel data micro-evidence from Ethiopia. More crops = more production. But the devil is in the details, I suspect.
- Identification of gaps in pearl millet germplasm from East and Southern Africa conserved at the ICRISAT genebank. We used to do this sort of thing by hand in my day.
- At3g08030 transcript: a molecular marker of seed ageing. This mRNA could predict germination performance of a dry seed lot across species. Good for genebanks?
- Assembling a core collection from the flax world collection maintained by Plant Gene Resources of Canada. You don’t hear much about core collections these days, why is that?