- Indigenous Grasses for Rehabilitating Degraded African Drylands. Promising results, but it’s not easy.
- Variability in the Global Proso Millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) Germplasm Collection Conserved at the ICRISAT Genebank. Asian, European and mixed clusters, based on morphology. Out of over 800 accessions, 3 (IPm 2069, IPm 2076 and IPm 2537) are rich in grain Fe, Zn, Ca, and protein.
- Household-specific targeting of agricultural advice via mobile phones: Feasibility of a minimum data approach for smallholder context. A little household data goes a long way. Includes crop diversity info?
- The genome of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata [L.] Walp.). There’s a gene for multiple organ gigantism.
- Reduced response diversity does not negatively impact wheat climate resilience. The suggestion that the statistical methods used were faulty means wheat may not be as in trouble in Europe as a previous paper suggested.
- Evaluating WorldClim Version 1 (1961–1990) as the Baseline for Sustainable Use of Forest and Environmental Resources in a Changing Climate. Maybe not as good as it might be. But what’s the alternative?
- Worldwide phylogeography and history of wheat genetic diversity. Three groups, with one (the Asian genepool) hardly used in breeding.
- Durum Wheat (Triticum durum Desf.): Origin, Cultivation and Potential Expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa. From the Ethiopian highlands and Saharan oases to the mainstream?
- Global mapping of cost‐effective microalgal biofuel production areas with minimal environmental impact. The dry coasts of N and E Africa, the Middle East, and western S America. But how minimal is minimal?
- From women’s empowerment to food security: Revisiting global discourses through a cross-country analysis. The patriarchy is resourceful.
- Genetic association with high‐resolution climate data reveals selection footprints in the genomes of barley landraces across the Iberian Peninsula. Cold temperature, late‐season frost occurrence and water availability have driven landrace genetic differentiation.
No more FOMO
The good people at Plantae have started a Global Plant Science Events Calendar. You can submit events and subscribe.
The Global Plant Science Events Calendar is a community calendar for all conferences, scientific meetings, webinars and other events of interest to the plant science community around the world.
Seems like a great idea. If there’s something similar out there already, I don’t know about it. There’s even a Twitter feed that goes along with the calendar.
Would curing agricultural plant blindness have any effect?
From Jeremy’s latest newsletter. We included the paper he discusses in Brainfood recently.
There’s a pretty fascinating paper in Plants, People, Planet. Resetting the table for people and plants: Botanic gardens and research organizations collaborate to address food and agricultural plant blindness wants to enlist botanic gardens in a broad effort to restore our ability to see plants. There’s a good long list of previous exhibits and displays mounted by botanic gardens and demonstration farms around the world, and to me they all sound absolutely fascinating.
But, as my friends will tell you, I’m weird. I’m very happy lingering among the multiplier onions and dye plants at the botanic gardens here in Rome, or tut-tutting at the labels, lack of, on the potatoes at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, my two most recent forays. And let me share a tip; if you’re looking for peace and quiet in a botanic garden, useful plants is the place to be, because most visitors are not weird like me.
The authors of the paper, of course, are weird like me. They’re the kind of people I’d like alongside at any of the exhibits they talk about and others they don’t. But although they cite one set of visitor numbers – 600,000 people saw the Amber Waves of Grain exhibit at the United States Botanic Garden in Washington DC in 2015 – there’s precious little evidence it had any impact on any of them. I’m sure, too, that many directors of botanic gardens would love to put on the sort of exhibits being called for, if they but had the cash.
It may be a shame, but people are generally blind to the plants that sustain them. And yet, they still manage to eat. Would it make any difference to food policy if people at large had clearer vision?
Primary vs secondary domestications
The 18th Conference of the International Workgroup for Palaeoethnobotany is on in Lecce, Italy this whole week. Seems to be off to an interesting start…
https://twitter.com/ArchaeoMichael/status/1135487311465058306
Meanwhile, in Montpellier…
#harlan3 #DYNADIV very nice venue and a lot of sunshine for Harlan3 Montpellier pic.twitter.com/PhOeuIArzO
— Philippe Cubry (@philippecubry) June 3, 2019
Brainfood: Plant blindness, African goats, Tissue culture, Phenotyping databases, Mekong transformation, African Fertile Crescent, Salty tomatoes, Pigeonpea domestication, Pharaonic watermelon, Apple domestication, Social media and PAs, Messaging, De novo domestication
- Resetting the table for people and plants: Botanic gardens and research organizations collaborate to address food and agricultural plant blindness. There are so many ways to get people interested in plants.
- A review on goats in southern Africa: an untapped genetic resource. 500-600 years of natural selection must count for something.
- Agromorphologic, genetic and methylation profiling of Dioscorea and Musa species multiplied under three micropropagation systems. Methylation at some loci, but no phenotypic differences.
- Modelling Crop Genetic Resources Phenotyping Information Systems. Field to figures.
- Agricultural and food systems in the Mekong region: Drivers of transformation and pathways of change. Corn everywhere.
- Yam genomics supports West Africa as a major cradle of crop domestication. The Niger River Basin, to be precise. How long before corn takes over?
- A diversity of traits contributes to salinity tolerance of wild Galapagos tomatoes seedlings. 3 out of 67 accessions of 2 wild endemic species showed particularly high salinity tolerance.
- Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp. origins and domestication: the South and Southeast Asian archaeobotanical evidence. Here’s ground zero for domestication starting about 5000 years ago: 19.397833, 80.813132.
- A 3500-year-old leaf from a Pharaonic tomb reveals that New Kingdom Egyptians were cultivating domesticated watermelon. A Nile Valley origin?
- Origins of the Apple: The Role of Megafaunal Mutualism in the Domestication of Malus and Rosaceous Trees. Large fruits originally evolved to attract wild horses, deer and bears, which spread them far and wide; populations isolated by the Ice Age were brought back together by humans.
- Assessing global popularity and threats to Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas using social media data. Accessibility and infrastructure more important than biodiversity.
- Messaging matters: A systematic review of the conservation messaging literature. Communications professionals think that more input from communications professionals is needed for conservation professionals to communicate professionally.
- De Novo Domestication: An Alternative Route toward New Crops for the Future. Lots to play with, that’s for sure.