Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

June 25, 2019November 26, 2020

European spud history unthreaded

I could blog about the recent paper which used sequencing of old herbarium specimens, including this one collected by Darwin to trace the genetic history of potatoes in Europe. But I think I’ll let one of the authors do it instead, here.

If you don’t like Twitter, you can see the thread unspooled without going anywhere near it.

June 24, 2019November 15, 2021

The pink banana of Peru

From the latest issue of Jeremy’s newsletter:

The standard story of the banana’s domestication and spread is that it started in southeast Asia, popped across to Africa and then went to the Caribbean and the tropical zones of the Americas. Peru’s best kept banana secret looks into a very special group of bananas called Iholena cultivars. That’s their Hawaiian name, and a clue to the reverse journey they made, east across the Pacific. The taste of these varieties reflects “a rich and lingering semi-sweetness piqued with a lemony tang”. That may be one reason people in Peru like them. Another is that they are very nutritious; the pink-orange pulp is high in vitamin A precursors. ProMusa advises waiting until the skin is black before eating one of these bananas, should you be so lucky, because the peel turns yellow before the fruit is ripe.

There’s more where that came from.

June 24, 2019

CGIAR gets its data together

GARDIAN, the Global Agricultural Research Data Innovation & Acceleration Network, is the CGIAR flagship data harvester. GARDIAN enables the discovery of publications and datasets from the thirty-odd institutional publications and data repositories across all CGIAR Centers to enable value addition and innovation via data reuse.

Among the goodies that GARDIAN harvests are two geo-referenced datasets: genebank accession localities from Genesys and 2005 crop production, harvested area and yield. I’ve often advocated here for the mashing up of these datasets. Here, for example, is irrigated harvested area (grey-black) and genebanks accessions (dark green) for rice in part of Asia.

The colour scheme needs work, I guess, but it’s a start.

There are also about 250 documents featuring the word “genebank” for you to explore.

GARDIAN is a product of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture.

June 24, 2019June 24, 2019

Brainfood: Macadamia domestication, Middle Eastern wheat, ART virus, Open science, Red Queen, Food system change, Chinese Neolithic booze, Dough rings, Making maps, Biofortification, Endophytes, African maize, Switchgrass diversity, Ancestral legume

Wild Origins of Macadamia Domestication Identified Through Intraspecific Chloroplast Genome Sequencing. One tree is the basis of the industry.
The Israeli Palestinian wheat landraces collection: restoration and characterization of lost genetic diversity. Bringing it all back home.
Using high‐throughput sequencing in support of a plant health outbreak reveals novel viruses in Ullucus tuberosus (Basellaceae). There’s always something…
Plant health emergencies demand open science: Tackling a cereal killer on the run. …but openness will get us through it.
Rapid evolution in plant–microbe interactions – a molecular genomics perspective. Until the next one.
Understanding food systems drivers: A critical review of the literature. Spoiler alert: urbanization, raise in consumer income, population growth, attention paid to diet & health issues, technological innovations, intensification and homogenization of the agricultural sector, increase in frequency and intensity of extreme events, general degradation in soils and agro-ecological conditions, improved access to infrastructure and information, trade policies and other processes influencing trade expansion, internationalization of private investments, concerns for food safety. I guess diversity is in there somewhere.
The origins of specialized pottery and diverse alcohol fermentation techniques in Early Neolithic China. So good, they invented fermentation twice.
The Hoard of the Rings. “Odd” annular bread-like objects as a case study for cereal-product diversity at the Late Bronze Age hillfort site of Stillfried (Lower Austria). Unbaked, tarallini-like dried wheat/barley dough rings may have been used ritualistically. No, not like that.
EviAtlas: a tool for visualising evidence synthesis databases. Everybody likes a map.
Editorial: Improving the Nutritional Content and Quality of Crops: Promises, Achievements, and Future Challenges. A review of reviews of biofortification, and more.
Fungal endophyte diversity from tropical forage grass Brachiaria. 38 fungi isolated from 9 Brachiaria species, but unclear if any are beneficial.
Characteristics of maize cultivars in Africa: How modern are they and how many do smallholder farmers grow? Out of 500 samples in 13 countries, about half were in some way improved, covering about half of the surveyed planted area.
QTL × environment interactions underlie adaptive divergence in switchgrass across a large latitudinal gradient. You can combine alleles which are locally advantageous in different places to get a
super-biofuel.
Reconstruction of ancestral genome reveals chromosome evolution history for selected legume species. The wild ancestor of peanut, pigeonpea, soybean, beans, mungbean, chickpea, lotus and medics was closest to wild peanuts. Maybe they can synthesize it?

June 21, 2019June 21, 2019

Europeans working on European crop working groups

‪The European crop conservation network — ECPGR — has a couple of new crop working groups, on maize and on berries. All the working groups have very informative pages on the ECPGR website, including details of all members and a mailing list, a link to relevant germplasm, and meeting and project reports. Worth exploring, if you’re interested in those crops. Start with berries.

A reminder that you can explore data from the European genebank network on the Eurisco website, and also mashed up with genebanks from other parts of the world on Genesys. As an example, here’s the Eurisco Ribes data on Genesys. Unclick the “EURISCO” tab to see what’s available in genebanks outside Europe.

LATER: Oh, and by the way, European genebanks have also started to review each other. The CGIAR genebanks have also all been reviewed by external experts in the past few years.