Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Marc Deletre clarifies that yam bean paper:
Yep, you’re right, the species’ names should be in the reverse order [in the abstract]. As it is it suggests that P. ahipa is the progenitor, but actually it’s the opposite.
Sometimes, you just have to read the whole paper.
Congratulations to Daniel Debouck, bean expert and erstwhile manager of the CIAT genebank, for having a new Phaseolus species named after him:
The specific epithet honours Daniel G. Debouck, given his scholarly contributions, and extensive and systematic collections of wild and domesticated Phaseolus throughout the Americas. He was the first to discover this species during a field expedition in Peru (Debouck 1989, 1990). Seeds from one of these collections (G 21245) were sent to UC Davis, where allozyme analyses provided evidence of their uniqueness, not fitting in either the Andean or wild Mesoamerican Phaseolus vulgaris. Based on these results, funding for additional explorations in Ecuador and Colombia, were granted. Further analyses on newly collected materials provided additional evidence from which earlier papers by Debouck et al. (1993) and Kami et al. (1995) evolved.
The 28th International Congress for Conservation Biology (ICCB 2017), or the XIX International Botanical Congress (IBC 2017)? Thanks to Twitter, both. And next month the XXX International Horticultural Congress (IHC 2018), just for good measure.
Oh, and while we’re at it, Happy 50th Birthday to IITA.
The indefatigable Dorian Fuller has been even less fatigable than usual lately, with a couple of papers in the past few weeks on the history of the horsegram, Macrotyloma uniflorum. The first is a general review of the geographical, linguistic and archaeological evidence for the origins of the crop. They point to a long history in India and at least two separate domestications there.
The second is a much deeper dive into the history of domestication, using high resolution x-ray computed tomography with a synchrotron to measure non-destructively the decrease in seed coat thickness with time in archaeological remains of domesticated material. A thin seed coat is thought to be related to loss of dormancy, and hence part of the domestication syndrome. It had been suggested that rare non-dormant variants might have been selected during domestication, but the evidence from horsegram is that even the thick-coated, and therefore presumably still dormant, material was domesticated.
Which is all very interesting, but what I want to leave you with is a little quiz. Given that Kersting’s groundnut is now also in Macrotyloma, as M. geocarpum (Harms) Maréchal & Baudet, how many other con-generic species can you think of that were domesticated on separate continents? Apart from the two Oryza species, of course.