Wild relatives

Nibbles: PGR course, Vegetable seed kits, Maize data, Rice metabolomics, Rewilding, Sheep diversity, Llama economics, Canary flora, Cuba urban ag, Ducks, Cynara, Food sovereignty

The annual Wageningen agrobiodiversity conservation course is in India this year. Hannes says it’s really good.
AVRDC’s veggie seed kits are a hit in Orissa.
CIMMYT swimming in data. Waving, not drowning.
IRRI not doing badly either. But “quantitative train loci” is a new one on me.
Australia thinking about introducing elephants. Yeah because that sort of thing has been such a success in the past.
Well, actually, with sheep, I suppose it has, in a way. And the genetics says breeders have a lot of diversity to play with still.
Your mama is a llama.
The Island of Dogs has crop wild relatives. No, not the one in London.
Cuba goes for new urban crops. And not for the first time, Shirley. But what about the old ones?
Quick, duck! This piece has been rather a hit for me over on Facebook.
VII International Symposium on Artichoke, Cardoon and Their Wild Relatives: The (Very Expensive) Book.
Food sovereignty “started in New England”. Huh? And proponents “want to eat and sell the food they grow free from interference from state and federal regulators”. Huh?

Banana boffins at each others’ throats over alleged new species. Great spectator sport.
What does a Musa voucher specimen look like, I wonder.
Fancy shmanzy Bangkok restaurant links up with heirloom seedbank.
Aroid network working really hard.
Marker-assisted selection: a biotechnology we can all get behind. Can’t we?
Conservation in Sierra Leone. No agrobiodiversity, natch.

Effects of Introducing Threatened Falcons into Vineyards on Abundance of Passeriformes and Bird Damage to Grapes. Potential savings of US$234/ha for Sauvignon Blanc, more for Pinot Noir.
Genetic characterization and gene flow in different geographical-distance neighbouring natural populations of wild soybean (Glycine soja Sieb. & Zucc.) and implications for protection from GM soybeans. There is a small amount of outcrossing, which decreases with distance. GM crops should be grown far from wild populations, certainly more than 1.5km. And we can work out better ways to collect for ex situ conservation.
Phylogenetic relationships, interspecific hybridization and origin of some rare characters of wild soybean in the subgenus Glycine soja in China. Intermediate forms are closer to the wild than the cultivated species.
Mitochondrial genomes from modern horses reveal the major haplogroups that underwent domestication. A diversity of maternal lines were domesticated about 150,000 years ago, leading to about 18 modern haplogroups. One of them is only found in the only remaining wild horse, E. przewalskii.

Mike Jackson gets himself a pulpit. Welcome to the blogosphere, Mike!
More on the Filipino ex-genebank.
What they grew in an ancient Israelite garden. Can they really tell Citrus species apart from their pollen?
More American maps to mashup with obesity and food insecurity: land use, renewable energy sources…. I do hope someone is keeping track. Even of the more esoteric stuff, of course, like the names of softdrinks.
Yet more on horse domestication.
Another organic farming externality for your consideration. Thanks, Robert.
ILRI gets innovative on this whole training thing.
“The future of chocolate” revealed.
Boffins look at fossil bison epigenetics to investigate adaptation to climate change. What will they think of next. Well, applying it to chickens, for a start.
Other boffins move potato anti-nematode genes into bananas. No word on the epigenetics of it all.
Indian report on how to strengthen role of agriculture in nutrition.
Kew has money for fieldwork.
Cleaning messy taxonomic data. Useful in Genebank Database Hell?

Big grant for TC Dublin to create DNA matrix of ancient livestock, will identify parchments too.
Kew unites Augustine Henry’s letters with the objects and specimens he collected; agrobiodiversity included.