Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

July 16, 2017

CILY in cassava: not so fast

So it turns out the article the previous post on the possibility of Côte d’Ivoire lethal yellowing phytoplasma (CILY) attacking cassava in that country may have been a bit premature. Dr Lava Kumar, virologist and Head of Germplasm Health Unit at IITA, left the following comment on my Facebook page:

Misleading! The symptoms on these leaves are typical cassava mosaic. Authors of this study happened to detect CILY in CMD infected plants and left it loose for interpretation. Reports of this kind can create needless phytosanitary bottlenecks. Wish NDR editorial review was better.

Time to wheel on Koch’s Postulates?

July 14, 2017July 14, 2017

CILY jumps to cassava?

You know that disease that we said about a year ago was threatening coconut plantations (and, incidentally, a coconut genebank) in Côte d’Ivoire? Yeah, Côte d’Ivoire lethal yellowing phytoplasma (CILY) that’s the one, well remembered.

Well, it looks like it may be affecting cassava as well.

That’s not good. Not good at all.

To our knowledge this is the first report of a phytoplasma affecting cassava in Côte d’Ivoire. The findings suggest that cassava may be a potential alternative host for the CILY phytoplasma, which poses a serious threat for the food security of the smallholder coconut and cassava farmers, especially women in Grand-Lahou, Côte d’Ivoire.

July 11, 2017

Creating a Global Seed Conservation Directory

This form will be used to populate an online Seed Conservation Knowledge Hub – a directory of facilities, individuals, and expertise in all aspects of seed conservation. Your participation completing this form is supporting the development of a tool that will benefit the seed conservation community. The information you provide in this form (apart from your contact information, unless specified) will be included in an online directory on BGCI’s website.

Now why hasn’t someone thought of this before?

July 10, 2017July 10, 2017

Brainfood: Wild foods, Maize in Guatemala, Wild lentils, Sorghum gaps, Ethiopian erosion, Chikanda barcoding, Brazil nut systems, Wild carrots, Ancient wild potato use, Wild wheat grains

The role of wild fruits and vegetables in delivering a balanced and healthy diet. Not great, until they’re domesticated.
Maize Diversity, Market Access, and Poverty Reduction in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. Forget maize.
Evaluation of Wild Lentil Species as Genetic Resources to Improve Drought Tolerance in Cultivated Lentil. Environment explained drought response in wild lentils better than molecular classification.
Geographical distribution, diversity and gap analysis of East African sorghum collection conserved at the ICRISAT genebank. Both Sudans.
Explaining the Ethiopian farmers’ perceptions on potential loss of traditional crop varieties: A principal components regression analysis. Poor farmers know more, and care more, about loss of traditional landraces.
High-throughput sequencing of African chikanda cake highlights conservation challenges in orchids. Those are very biodiverse cakes, but not in a good way.
Revisiting the ‘cornerstone of Amazonian conservation’: a socioecological assessment of Brazil nut exploitation. It’s actually in pretty good shape, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.
Phylogenetic Prediction of Alternaria Leaf Blight Resistance in Wild and Cultivated Species of Carrots. Look for taller material in clade A.
Starch granule evidence for the earliest potato use in North America. S. jamesii may have been used for 10,000 years in Utah.
Genome-Wide Association Study of Grain Architecture in Wild Wheat Aegilops tauschii. Two genetic lineages, with big differences in grain width and weight.

July 6, 2017

Featured: Flavour

KCTomato is in the mood to rant about breeding for flavour:

(Rant) My only concern is if entities do so based on financial gain and limit or prevent others from accessing such material or information in the future.

Thank you Stubbe, Rick and others for openly sharing material and having some fore sight that they were contributing and sharing something to be built on rather than a means to an end. (/Rant)

But not only rant, to be fair. Read the whole thing.