Wild relatives

July 2, 2012July 2, 2012

Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference 2012…

…is off and running in Copenhagen

The Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC) will convene expertise in the fields of biodiversity informatics, genomics, earth observation, natural history collections, biodiversity research and policy needed to set such collaboration in motion.

Follow it on Twitter. See the presentations.

allowing access to relevant environmental data and predict, anywhere on earth, on any res, at any time, as a service for anyone #gbic2012

— Donat Agosti (@myrmoteras) July 2, 2012

Report on it here, if you like.

LATER: Oh gosh, there’s also this today: 2nd LCIRAH Annual Workshop “The Role of Agricultural and Food Systems Research in Combating Chronic Disease for Development.” Here’s the hashtag.

July 2, 2012July 3, 2012

Brainfood: Brassica breeding, NUS breeding, Soybean domestication, Bambara groundnut, Jatropha chain, Setaria drought tolerance

Developing genetic resources for pre-breeding in Brassica oleracea L.: an overview of the UK perspective. Genebanks will set you free.
Competitive underutilized crops will depend on the state funding of breeding programmes: an opinion on the example of Europe. Divert some subsidies paid directly to farmers to a Europe-wide breeding programme devoted to NUS.
Analysis of average standardized SSR allele size supports domestication of soybean along the Yellow River. The middle part, to be precise, where it loops north.
Bambara nut: A review of utlisation, market potential and crop improvement. Need some functioning value chains, for pity’s sake. That’s why previous promotion efforts failed miserably. Not because they’re, well, not that great a crop? In fact they’re drought-tolerant, tasty, nutritious; but difficult to process, prepare. So do market research to inform breeding.
State-of-the-art of the Jatropha curcas productive chain: From sowing to biodiesel and by-products. Value chains? You want value chains? I’ve got a state-of-the-art one right here.
Validation of an allele-specific marker associated with dehydration stress tolerance in a core set of foxtail millet accessions. The marker explains about 27% of total variation in dehydration tolerance in a core collection, which is apparently pretty good.

June 29, 2012June 29, 2012

Nibbles: C4 rice breeding, Tomato genes, Fruit/nut wild relatives, Peruvian cuisine

C4 rice: it’s really very, very complicated. And Ford Denison on the reason. Kinda.
Speaking of tradeoffs, this tomato taste vs colour story is everywhere. What is it about the (lack of) taste of tomatoes that gets people so riled up? And I wonder what the ones grown in Alaska taste like.
I International Symposium on Wild Relatives of Subtropical and Temperate Fruit and Nut Crops: the abstracts are online. Does it include the tomato. Nope, not getting into that one.
There are several subtropical and temperate fruit involved in Peruvian cuisine. Right? Come on, help me out with these segues.

June 28, 2012June 28, 2012

Nibbles: Impact evaluation reviews, Coffee podcast, Pretty on sustainable intensification, Patient capital, Searching for species names, Searching in general, Palestinian agriculture, Korean Neolithic, Mesquite in Africa, CIMMYT-China, Banana trade, UK plant science, Breadfruit, Weed, Beans in Mexico, Macadamia, Organic Cali

How to do impact evaluation. Required reading.
Podcast on the history of coffee from Linn. Soc. Required listening.
How to intensify agriculture sustainably. Meah.
It may well involve patient capital though.
This thing will look for all the species names in a piece of text or website. Bound to come in useful one of these days.
How to use Google properly. And a vaguely agricultural quiz to see if you’ve been listening in class.
Protecting ancient irrigation system on the West Bank.
And finding the oldest agricultural site in East Asia.
The good and bad side of Prosopis in Africa.
CIMMYT in China.
The banana as a weapon.
Touring UK plant science sites.
Mapping breadfruit to save the world.
“Over 78 million Europeans (15–64 years) have tried cannabis…” Purely medicinal purposes, man.
“We wanted to see how farmers are reacting to this global climate change…” Bean farmers, not cannabis farmers.
If you’re at the Noosa Botanic Gardens, Cooroy, you can see rare macadamias. Yeah but can you smoke ’em?
Organic seed systems in California. No, not cannabis, settle down.

June 25, 2012June 25, 2012

Brainfood: Synthetic wheat, Pisum, Maize products, Seed predation, Cajanus, Tripsacum, Horse domestication, Cicer genomics, Cereal vulnerability, Allotments, Conservation units, Chilie diversity, Endophytes

Sources of resistance in primary synthetic hexaploid wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) to insect pests: Hessian fly, Russian wheat aphid and Sunn pest in the fertile crescent. Domestication do-over continues to show promise. Closest thing to a jetpack?
Evaluation of seed yield and seed yield components in red–yellow (Pisum fulvum) and Ethiopian (Pisum abyssinicum) peas. Weird pea species show promise in Serbia, of all places.
Consumer preferences for maize products in urban Kenya. Most still like it white. Not much promise there.
Bush pig (Potamochoerus porcus) seed predation of bush mango (Irvingia gabonensis) and other plant species in Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s pretty unpromising for seeds, especially right under the tree.
Phenotypic diversity in Cajanus species and identification of promising sources for agronomic traits and seed protein content. 14 accessions of 8 seem promising (out of a total of 198 accessions of 18 species from the ICRISAT collection).
Genetic relations among Tripsacum species revealed by genomic variation. They might be promising.
Reconstructing the origin and spread of horse domestication in the Eurasian steppe. Wild Equus ferus moves out of eastern Eurasian steppe 160 kya, shows promise, gets domesticated in the western part, but continues to introgress with local wild horses as it moves out from there.
Large-scale development of cost-effective SNP marker assays for diversity assessment and genetic mapping in chickpea and comparative mapping in legumes. What can I tell you. It’s large-scale. It’s cost effective. It’s promising. I’m still waiting for my jetpack.
The socioeconomics of food crop production and climate change vulnerability: a global scale quantitative analysis of how grain crops are sensitive to drought. It’s the middle income countries that are especially vulnerable, and thus where all that promise needs to come good.
Deskilling, agrodiversity, and the seed trade: a view from contemporary British allotments. Please promise to keep open-pollinated heirlooms out of the marketplace.
Harnessing genomics for delineating conservation units. But you need to combine information from neutral and adaptive markers in fancy ways to fulfill the promise.
Why are not all chilies hot? A trade-off limits pungency. It’s all about how much water is available.
Endophytic Insect-Parasitic Fungi Translocate Nitrogen Directly from Insects to Plants. Suppose we better promise to conserve these things too then. And here’s the slightly longer short version.