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.
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.
Brainfood: Tea diversity, Sorghum CWR, Wine certification, Salty maize, Broadening cacao, Wild emmer evolution, Wheat breeding, Nutrition info, Indian rice, Dietary diversity treble, Potato enhancement
- Assessment of Genetic Diversity of Tea Germplasm for Its Management and Sustainable Use in Korea Genebank. There’s not enough.
- Crop wild relatives as a genetic resource for generating low-cyanide, drought-tolerant Sorghum. From Australia, of all places.
- Consumers’ preferences for biodiversity in vineyards: a choice experiment on wine. Even buyers of cheap plonk are willing to pay for biodiversity.
- Characterization of natural genetic variation identifies multiple genes involved in salt tolerance in maize. 8 of them, at least.
- Extending the cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) gene pool with underrepresented genotypes: growth and yield traits. Lots of potential for broadening the base of the crop in West Africa.
- Elevated mutation and selection in wild emmer wheat in response to 28 years of global warming. Evolution continues, but not necessarily in a good way.
- Genetic Gains in Wheat Breeding and Its Role in Feeding the World. Focusing on ICARDA and CIMMYT. How much would have been possible without the genebanks?
- Agriculture–nutrition linkages in farmers’ communication networks. You can spread nutrition information through existing agricultural extension channels, but you have to be gender sensitive and some people may be excluded. Twas ever thus.
- Population genetics analyses of North-East Indian indigenous rice landraces revealed divergent history and alternate origin of aroma in aus group. A real melting pot.
- Review: Meta-analysis of the association between production diversity, diets, and nutrition in smallholder farm households. Increasing production diversity won’t always lead to improved diets. But it could.
- Farm-Level Agricultural Biodiversity in the Peruvian Andes Is Associated with Greater Odds of Women Achieving a Minimally Diverse and Micronutrient Adequate Diet. Like here for instance.
- Farm-Level Agricultural Biodiversity Is Not the Principal Contributor to Diverse and Micronutrient-Rich Diets, nor to Overall Food Consumption in Smallholder Farm Households. Or maybe not.
- Potato Germplasm Enhancement Enters the Genomics Era. About time? Or jumping the gun?
Brainfood: Traditional grazing, Land use & health, Local foods, Forage fish, OFSP, Olives & nematodes, Ohia seed, Mauka, Wolf erosion, American CWR, Open seeds, Global diseases, Neolithic LP, Rice in the US, Useful plants
- Traditional grazing systems in the Venetian Alps: Effects of grazing methods and environmental factors on cattle behaviour. Better for the cows, better for the cheese, better for the environment.
- Biodiversity, land use change, and human health in northeastern Madagascar: an interdisciplinary study. Paddy rice cultivation is bad for you.
- Local traditional foods contribute to diversity and species richness of rural women’s diet in Ecuador. Local food species are good for you.
- Illustrating the hidden economic, social and ecological values of global forage fish resources. $18.7 billion per annum, over 3 times of their direct catch value. But what exactly are they?
- Determination of carotenoids in sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L., Lam) tubers: Implications for accurate provitamin A determination in staple sturdy tuber crops. Not all carotenoids have provitamin A properties.
- Evaluation of the Phytopathological Reaction of Wild and Cultivated Olives as a Means of Finding Promising New Sources of Genetic Diversity for Resistance to Root-Knot Nematodes. Some wild relatives could help.
- Picking from the Past in Preparation for a Pest: Seed Banks Outperform Herbaria as Sources of Preserved ‘Ōhi‘a Seed. I would hope so.
- Unearthing the “Lost” Andean Root Crop “Mauka” (Mirabilis expansa [Ruíz & Pav.] Standl.). On the rebound?
- High levels of recent wolf × dog introgressive hybridization in agricultural landscapes of central Italy. Not much real wolf left.
- A Road Map for Conservation, Use, and Public Engagement around North America’s Crop Wild Relatives and Wild Utilized Plants. Understand, protect, collect, conserve, make available, inform. Allrighty then.
- Open source seed, a revolution in breeding or yet another attack on the breeder’s exemption? May backfire.
- A global surveillance system for crop diseases. A Global Surveillance System, in fact. Here’s the origin story.
- New insights into Neolithic milk consumption through proteomic analysis of dental calculus. People unlikely to have lactase persistence consumed milk, which means either they were in constant discomfort or processed it in some way.
- Race and Region: Tracing the Cultural Pathways of Rice Consumption in the United States, 1680-1960. WW2 made it a cosmopolitan commodity.
- The climatic challenge: Which plants will people use in the next century? Depends on the tradeoffs between diversification-specialization and between substitution-adaptation.
Brainfood: Old seeds, Anthropocene, Apple polyphenols, Maize adaptation, Maize adoption, Biodiversity designs, Early millet, Asian populations, Japanese catalogue, Legacy data, PVP, Synthetic wheat double
- Unlocking the secrets of extreme seed longevity: the relevance of historic botanical collections to modern research. Claims that very old seeds are still alive are probably exaggerated. Except from genebanks, of course.
- Archaeological assessment reveals Earth’s early transformation through land use. We had transformed the world globally by 3000 years ago.
- Genome-wide association studies in apple reveal loci of large effect controlling apple polyphenols. It should be surprisingly easy to breed really healthy apples. No word on adaptation.
- Identifying loci with breeding potential across temperate and tropical adaptation via EigenGWAS and EnvGWAS. 13 genomic regions under ecological selection in maize. No word on nutrition.
- The maize frontier in rural South India: Exploring the everyday dynamics of the contemporary food regime. Adoption is being driven both top-down and bottom-up.
- Simple study designs in ecology produce inaccurate estimates of biodiversity responses. Complexity in experimental design is worth it.
- Early integration of pastoralism and millet cultivation in Bronze Age Eurasia. In southeastern Kazakhstan, ca 2700 BC, mobile pastoralists winter foddered their sheep and goat with the region’s earliest cultivated millet, which came from China.
- The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia. People and crops moved together, both east and west. Oh, and are the above the Yanmaya?
- Lost Grains and Forgotten Vegetables from Japan: the Seikei Zusetsu Agricultural Catalog (1793–1804). Fewer than half of the 109 species illustrated are still grown in Japan.
- Soil legacy data rescue via GlobalSoilMap and other international and national initiatives. Should do the same with genebank data too.
- Insights into deployment of DNA markers in plant variety protection and registration. Will increasingly be used in support of DUS, apparently.
- Genetic Contribution of Synthetic Hexaploid Wheat to CIMMYT’s Spring Bread Wheat Breeding Germplasm. 20% of the lines in international yield trials were synthetic-derived with an average genetic contribution from the D genome wild relative of 15.6%.
- Genetic diversity and population structure analysis of synthetic and bread wheat accessions in Western Siberia. The Japanese synthetics are something else.