And talking of horses. It’s kinda amazing to think that the dog and the horse, eventually domesticated at different times and in different places in Eurasia, can trace their lineages back to ancestors which co-evolved as hunter and prey on the grasslands of a continent — North America — which was at the time completely cut off from the rest of the world, and to which they were re-introduced, again quite independently, millions of years later.
Grey horses understood
An easy way to mark yourself as a novice is to call a white horse white. They’re greys. I don’t know why, but there it is. 1 Today, thanks to a paper in Nature Genetics, I do know why they’re grey. 2 Turns out they are over-expressing two genes on horse chromosome 25, thanks to a duplicated bit of DNA 4600 base pairs long. And that’s true in more than 800 greys from 8 different breeds. the duplication has not been found in any non-grey horses.
Greys generally start off with dark hair, but gradually lose the dark pigment, leaving them with white hair and, usually, black-skin. Alas, greys also often develop melanomas that reduce their lifespan, and also show depigmentation of the skin like viteligo in humans. So what’s going on? Leif Andersson and his colleagues suggest that maybe the two genes, called STX17 and NR4A3, may be speeding up the rate of division of pigment cells in the skin and the hair follicles. In the skin, this leads to melanomas. In the hair follicles it depletes the stem cells.
The miombo woodlands on Google Earth
A video on capturing, sharing and interacting with spatial information on the miombo woodlands of Malawi. Via.
Agricultural economist put on the spot
Over at the Freakonomics Blog, there’s a Q&A with an eminent agricultural economist, Daniel Sumner of Davis. A timely idea, and some of the questions are actually pretty good, with a few even concerning agrobiodiversity, albeit obliquely. Problem is, I can’t see the answers. What am I missing? We’ve been thinking about doing something similar here, actually. Except not with an agricultural economist. Nor, in fact, with anyone eminent. Just Jeremy and I, at your disposal for a day, to answer questions on agricultural biodiversity, live. What do people think? Worth a try?
Soils and gardens
There’s an exhibition on soil at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, entitled “Dig it.” And there’s a kids’ book, “Soil! Get the inside scoop,” courtesy of the Soil Science Society of America. I guess the two things are connected. Anyway, they’re both good ideas, and seem to pay due attention to the agrobiodiversity angle.
Speaking of exhibitions, there’s another interesting one relevant to our theme, this one in London. The organizers of IslamExpo have created a traditional Islamic garden at the centre of that busy showcase.
We hope visitors will take a little time out from the main exhibition to wander into one of the four gardens and perhaps sit a while surrounded by the lush planting, under one of the trees of Paradise (pomegranate, fig, date-palm or olive), collecting thoughts or listening to Qur’an recitation or a story by the winner of the Muslim Writers Award, Aliya Vaughan.