Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

October 16, 2019October 16, 2019

Wheat diversity for health

The objective of this conference is bringing the Wheat researchers and the Human Health community together to exchange information and discuss strategies for improving the health benefits of wheat by exploiting diverse genetic resources, modern breeding, genomics, and sustainable production and processing technologies.

You had me at Weißbier.

October 15, 2019October 15, 2019

Temperate forages at the NPGS

We just got hold of a very neat infographic summarizing the work of the USDA’s National Plant Germplasm System on the Management of Temperate-adapted Forage Legume Genetic Resources and Associated Information.

If you were to scan that QR code, you’d get here, and be able to select and order material from the USDA’s GRIN-Global site.

Here’s the distribution of over 6000 USDA-held accessions of Medicago, Trifolium and Lotus with geographical coordinates according to Genesys.

The colours show annual mean temperature.

October 14, 2019October 14, 2019

Brainfood: Diversification, Wheat genomics, Historical tom, Crop mapping, African crops & CC, Trans CWR, Fish nutrition, Seed storage, Indian rice, Food Neighbourhoods, Diet sustainability, Onion evaluation, Aussie wild rice, Rice evaluation

To diversify or not to diversify, that is the question. Pursuing agricultural development for smallholder farmers in marginal areas of Ghana. Diversify.
Improving grain yield, stress resilience and quality of bread wheat using large-scale genomics. A genotype –> phenotype map at last. I guess that means breeders are superfluous.
The earliest recorded tomato in Britain, in Wales. In 1590, no less.
Biotechnology of the sweetpotato: ensuring global food and nutrition security in the face of climate change. A whole special issue. Our troubles are over.
Probabilistic global maps of crop-specific areas from 1961 to 2014. A new, different, cooler algorithm provides somewhat different results to older, less cool algorithms.
Potential adaptive strategies for 29 sub-Saharan crops under future climate change. Climatic conditions not currently experienced by these crops will spread, but CWRs and diversity from outside Africa might help.
Trans Situ Conservation of Crop Wild Relatives. Just means properly integrated in and ex situ.
Criar y Dejarse Criar: Trans-Situ Crop Conservation and Indigenous Landscape Management through a Network of Global Food Neighborhoods. See what it means? Scaling up the Parque de la Papa.
Harnessing global fisheries to tackle micronutrient deficiencies. Small fish from the tropics could be really good for nutrition in some countries. Namibia, I’m looking at you.
Artificial seed aging reveals the invisible fraction: Implications for evolution experiments using the resurrection approach. Store your seeds properly.
Status of Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Genepool Collected from Western Ghats Region of India: Gap Analysis and Diversity Distribution Mapping using GIS Tools. Out of 678 rice landraces from this region, 43 have been used in crop improvement.
Advancing an Integrative Framework to Evaluate Sustainability in National Dietary Guidelines. In 32 sub-dimensions, no less. Important.
Assembly and characterisation of a unique onion diversity set identifies resistance to Fusarium basal rot and improved seedling vigour. Group according to local daylength.
Australian wild rice populations: a key resource for global food security. Because they’ve been isolated from the crop.
Novel method for evaluation of anaerobic germination in rice and its application to diverse genetic collections. No word on whether it’s applicable to Aussie wild species, but I bet it is.

October 10, 2019October 10, 2019

Diversity of genebanks meet in Hanoi

The light blogging this past week was because of the annual meeting of the CGIAR Genebank Platform. I’ll be writing about it presently, but in the meantime, you can check out #genebanks2019 to get a flavour of the proceedings.

View this post on Instagram

Altar #hanoi #vietnam #market #vegetables

A post shared by Luigi Guarino (@ggguarino) on Oct 1, 2019 at 9:14pm PDT

October 10, 2019

Towards normalizing better diets

5 years ago when we published global dietary change and increasing homogeneity (https://t.co/qbeGBGnple) and we were asked 'where do we go from here?' we had few answers. Finally some recommendations- https://t.co/u7JJnfW3j6 https://t.co/TfJ9NeTvXZ pic.twitter.com/JCbm5UQuU6

— Colin Khoury (@ColinKhoury) October 8, 2019

Spoiler alert: there’s more to it than information and awareness-raising.