- Genetic Structure of Foxtail Millet Landraces. China is the centre of diversity, and diversity structured geographically there.
- The Planteome database: an integrated resource for reference ontologies, plant genomics and phenomics. A sort of ontology of ontologies.
- Genetic diversity and structure of Iberian Peninsula cowpeas compared to world-wide cowpea accessions using high density SNP markers. Iberian material all falls into 1 (S Europe-N Africa) of 4 worldwide groups.
- Setting conservation priorities for crop wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent. 220 priority species.
- Effects of Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) Variety and Growing Environment on Beer Flavor. It’s not just the hops.
- Molecular Characterization of Sclerocarya birrea ICRAF Field Genebank Collections. Even the duplicates identified could be good for something.
- The Domestication Syndrome in Phoenix dactylifera Seeds: Toward the Identification of Wild Date Palm Populations. Fancy maths shows there may be actual wild date palms in Oman.
Our friends the seed dispersers
Botany One has been running an entertaining little series from Nigel Chaffey on how plants get about, as seeds and as the gametes that produce seeds. In the third and final part, we get to plants that could reasonably be considered of interest here, to whit cacao and useful forest trees. It turns out that chimpanzees in West Africa are not above nicking a few pods from cacao trees and spreading the seeds an average of 407 m from the plantations. I like the ideas that this illuminates the thorny question of who “owns” a crop.
Sticking with West African trees, it seems that gorilla and chimpanzee dung offers “a cost effective and non-invasive way to restore native forested habitats”. Of course, if the gorillas and chimpanzees are themselves threatened and don’t travel widely, that’s not going to help forests further afield. Chaffey suggests collecting their dung and distributing these auto-fertilising, self-selecting seed packages directly over the area to be reforested.
I wonder what the forest genetic resources people would make of that?
A first for IRRI’s genebank
Seeds of an aromatic variety of rice from the International Rice Genebank Collection, accession IRGC 117265 (McNally et al., 2009), and of a commonly grown indica variety, ‘Macassane’, were planted for harvest in the 2015 dry season (DS) and 2016 wet season (WS), respectively (Fig. 1A,C). Seeds were sampled either from the International Rice Genebank (IRG) active collection (4°C) (IRGC 117265; https://doi.org/10.18730/1PG6J) or the storage facility (20°C and 30% RH) at the upland site (‘Macassane’) and held at 50°C for 5 days to break dormancy.
And so it begins. The first use (we think) of a DOI for a genebank accession in a published paper. Congratulations to Kath Whitehouse, Fiona Hay and Richard Ellis. And of course to the bridge-builder, Ruaraidh Sackville Hamilton, who had this to say:
We are now waiting to see how soon the Global Information System will “harvest” this info. In due course it should automatically discover that this publication’s DOI refers to this PGRFA’s DOI, and link the two DOIs.
Brainfood: Coffee apocalypse, Barley journey, Haplotype cores, Pollinator conservation, Rooting for tubers, Aussie CWR, European veggies, Capsicum evolution, Wheat genome
- Climate change adaptation of coffee production in space and time. There’s a plan, at least for Nicaragua.
- Journey to the east: Diverse routes and variable flowering times for wheat and barley en route to prehistoric China. Growing in diverse environments pre-adapted barley for its shift to spring sowing and move eastwards to China.
- Capturing haplotypes in germplasm core collections using bioinformatics. Fortunately, “the number of accessions necessary to capture a given percentage of the haplotypic diversity present in the entire collection can be estimated.”
- Pollinator Diversity: Distribution, Ecological Function, and Conservation. 350,000 species!
- Roots, Tubers and Bananas: Planning and research for climate resilience. Much the same, but faster.
- Priorities for enhancing the ex situ conservation and use of Australian crop wild relatives. Go north, young woman.
- Consequences of climate change for conserving leafy vegetable CWR in Europe. Go, err, northwest.
- Phylogenetic relationships, diversification and expansion of chili peppers (Capsicum, Solanaceae). Monophyletic clade which originated along the Andes of W to NW South America and spread clockwise around the Amazon.
- The Aegilops tauschii genome reveals multiple impacts of transposons. The D genome bites the dust.
New livestock diversity information system is here, almost
With about 20% of the world’s local farm animal breeds currently at risk of extinction, urgent action is needed to safeguard livestock diversity. This event will showcase the launch of an updated FAO tool, called the Domestic Animal Diversity Information System, or DAD-IS, that countries can use to monitor animal genetic resources that are important for food and agriculture. Containing information on 8,800 breeds of livestock and poultry across the world, the new DAD-IS platform can be used to measure SDG progress, create attractive graphics and tables for internal reporting purposes or export data for scientific analysis.
Sounds great, and you can see all the details on the recent webcast from FAO. But it’s still the old version that’s online, damn it. So when are we going to see (or hear) all the new bells and whistles? Well, as it happens, a member of the audience asked that very same question, and the answer is about 1:29 hours (sic) in: Monday, 27 November. How am I going to get through the weekend? Stay tuned for the results of my road test.