- Genetic contribution of emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccon Schrank) to heat tolerance of bread wheat. It’s considerable.
- Warm Season Grain Legume Landraces from the South of Europe for Germplasm Conservation and Genetic Improvement. Ok ex situ, in situ not so much.
- Onobrychis viciifolia; a comprehensive literature review of its history, etymology, taxonomy, genetics, agronomy and botany. The fall and rise of an orphan forage.
- Interstitial but Resilient: Nomadic Shepherds in Piedmont (Northwest Italy) Amidst Spatial and Social Marginalization. Truly a vale of tears.
- Parallel vs. Convergent Evolution in Domestication and Diversification of Crops in the Americas. Still can’t tell which is more prevalent.
- Whole-Genome Analysis of Candidate genes Associated with Seed Size and Weight in Sorghum bicolor Reveals Signatures of Artificial Selection and Insights into Parallel Domestication in Cereal Crops. 63 seed size genes selected during domestication in sorghum, a significant number of which in maize and rice also.
- A systematic review of the socio-economic impacts of large-scale tree plantations, worldwide. Not a good idea.
- Recent Advances in Sexual Propagation and Breeding of Garlic. Restoration of flowering ability has done wonders for diversity. With diversity poster goodness.
- Core collection of two important indigenous vegetables; Gboma eggplant (Solanum macrocarpon L.) and Jute mallow (Corchorus olitorius L.) in Africa: An important step for exploitation of existing germplasm and development of improved cultivars. Interesting, of course, but I wouldn’t call these core collections. But I won’t complain again if it gets the stuff used more.
- Measuring the impact of plant breeding on sub-Saharan African staple crops. High ROI for the usual suspects. How about the traditional veggies et al., though. Anyway, do readers want more on this paper? Let me know in the comments if you want a full post on the main findings.
- Allele-defined genome of the autopolyploid sugarcane Saccharum spontaneum L. A lot of the good stuff is in wild-cultivated rearranged chromosomes.
Who feeds Africa?
I thought I’d share the summary poster from that GRAIN paper on African farmers’ seed systems that I just Nibbled.
I may blog in more detail about this, but for now let me just say that even if you fully agree with all this it’s still possible to see a role for “formal sector” genebanks, as back-ups and facilitators of (especially long-distance) germplasm exchange. Why doesn’t the paper recognize this? Even if farmers’ seed systems do feed Africa, do they necessarily have to do it on their own?
Counting your chickens
A new version is out of the FAO global livestock density datasets, which we have blogged about before. This is the third iteration (GLW3), and it has a reference year of 2010. There’s a paper to give you all the details.1
But there’s more to come:
Future versions of GLW will differentiate stocks according to production systems for ruminant (meat vs. dairy) and monogastric species (intensive vs. extensive, meat vs. egg production). Higher resolution models2 for individual countries where the census data can support such predictions will also be produced.
The datasets are also available for download from Harvard Dataverse.
Footnotes:Diversity for Halloween
I’m not sure if I agree with the assertion, but this is a really nice poster.
US strawberries set to invade UK
It looks like UC Davis is making a move after declaring victory in the Strawberry Wars.
The University of California has entered into a master agreement with Global Plant Genetics, Ltd., based in Norfolk, England, for the sublicensing of new strawberry varieties in selected countries within Europe, the Mediterranean and South America. The agreement governs the commercialization of new varieties from the UC Davis Public Strawberry Breeding Program located at the University of California, Davis.
I wonder how the other side is doing.