- Cattle do the wild thing in Vietnam.
- West African Ruminant Livestock: The Movie.
- An interesting new botanical blog on me.
- Who says working in a genebank is unrewarding? Technician is honoured with award, and that is not an oca she’s fondling?
- Back40 dissects the trouble with agriculture; it isn’t dignified. Well, it is, but …
- Forests are really, really good for economies.
- Andy Jarvis pulls it all together: looking forward to a climatically less diverse world.
Climate change in the dry areas
You may remember I blogged from a conference in Amman over a year ago. It was about how climate change would affect food security in the dry areas. Well, the conference proceedings has been out for a while, courtesy of ICARDA, but I only just found out about it. Lots of interesting stuff in there. Thanks, Colin.
Brainfood: Pollinators, Cattle foraging, Sweet potato-pig system, Kava quality, Pastures, Pollen flow, Agrarian reform, Genotype diversity, Cacao cropping, Outcrossing
- Contribution of pollinator-mediated crops to nutrients in the human food supply. 90% of Vitamin C for a start.
- Foraging behavior of Alberes cattle in a Mediterranean forest ecosystem. It’s a semi-feral breed in NE Spain and its foraging behaviour may well decrease the risk of fires.
- Assessing the impact of the SASA/CASREN technology interventions in the sweet potato-pig production systems in Zitong County (Sichuan, China). All well and good but in this day and age one would expect some exploration of the sustainability of the interventions.
- Proposal for a Kava Quality Standardization Code. Very much needed because poor quality was probably responsible for examples of liver toxicity in the past. This is how to avoid that in the future.
- Clipping stimulates productivity but not diversity in improved and semi-natural pastures in temperate Japan. Semi-natural pastures are more diverse than improved pastures, and can be reasonably productive. So there.
- Pollen flows within and between rice and millet fields in relation to farmer variety development in The Gambia. Depends on breeding system. Likely higher within fields than between. Still no cure for cancer.
- Land, landlords and sustainable livelihoods: The impact of agrarian reform on a coconut hacienda in the Philippines. It seems to be mainly in the mind.
- Genetic divergence is not the same as phenotypic divergence. It isn’t? I’ll alert the media.
- Scope economies and technical efficiency of cocoa agroforesty systems in Ghana. Multi-crop cocoa farms are better, in multiple ways.
- Gene flow increases fitness at the warm edge of a species’ range. Outcrossing between edge populations better for living on the edge than outcrossing within edge populations, outcrossing with a center population or selfing. For a Californian annual anyway. Interesting consequences for in situ CWR conservation, in particular in context of re-introductions. Do we worry too much about “genetic pollution”?
Climate change and PGRFA discussed, and discussed again
Jeremy and/or Andy will no doubt correct me if I’m wrong, because they’re there and I’m not, but I believe it is the very presentation embedded below that was made a matter of only minutes ago by our friend and colleague Andy Jarvis of CIAT at the Special Information Seminar on CLIMATE CHANGE AND GENETIC RESOURCES FOR FOOD AND AGRICULTURE: STATE OF KNOWLEDGE, RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES at FAO. How’s that for timeliness. If not, then Andy will probably give it at the CGRFA-13 side event on pretty much the same subject on Tuesday. Or maybe both? No online sign of the other presentations yet, but I’ll get the scoop on the event from the boys this evening, I expect.
Quinoa phylogenetics unraveled
Our regular reader and occasional contributor Eve Emshwiller informs us that her student Brian Walsh has won the award for best student poster from the Economic Botany Section of the Botanical Society of America at Botany 2011 in St. Louis. Here’s the abstract. There’s some talk of the poster itself perhaps being made available online in due course. Fingers crossed.
Phylogeny of American Chenopodium species with focus on origins of the domesticated taxa.
The edible seeds of quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa, Amaranthaceae) have gained popularity worldwide, based on nutritional qualities and ease of growing. Most people do not know quinoa is one of four cultigens of Chenopodium domesticated in the Americas: C. quinoa and C. pallidicaule from South America, C. berlandieri ssp. nuttalliae from Mesoamerica, and the extinct C. berlandieri ssp. jonesianum recovered from archaeological sites throughout eastern North America. Despite nearly 100 years of debate researchers still do not agree on the relationship among these domesticates. Conflicting hypotheses have been proposed asserting whether cultigens were domesticated independently or represent introductions into neighboring regions. Alternative hypotheses suggest two, three, or four independent domestications of Chenopodium in the Americas, and proposed several putative wild progenitors of the cultigens. To investigate the relationships among cultigens of Chenopodium and assess potential wild progenitors, a phylogenetic framework of the genus emphasizing New World species is required. Phylogenetic analyses of DNA sequences of non-coding loci, both nuclear (SOS1 intron 17, COS at103, ITS) and plastid (trnQ-rps16, trnL-trnT, ndhJ-trnF-trnL, psbD-trnT, and psbM-ycf6), were conducted using parsimony, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian analyses. Taxon sampling includes 19 Chenopodium species from North and South America, with focus on the extant cultigens and subspecific taxa within C. berlandieri.
Findings include the following: Chenopodium pallidicaule is genetically distinct from other extant cultigens.
Sampled cultivars of the Mesoamerican cultigen, C. berlandieri ssp. nuttalliae, unite in a single subclade, nested within, but distinct from wild C. berlandieri.
Chenopodium quinoa is nested within the C. berlandieri complex, but not within the C. berlandieri ssp. nuttalliae clade. Interestingly, the southern-most range of wild C. berlandieri is southern Mexico, whereas quinoa is cultivated in Eduador, Peru, and Bolivia. These findings are consistent with independent domestications of the extant cultigens. Using nucleotide markers unique to C. berlandieri ssp. nuttalliae, ancient-DNA analyses will be conducted to determine the relationship of the extinct cultigen, C. berlandieri ssp. jonesianum.