Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

May 25, 2017

Victory declared in Strawberry Wars

A federal jury has ruled in favor of the University of California in its lawsuit with two former UC Davis strawberry breeders and the private breeding company they created with UC-owned plants. A separate jury is expected to decide issues related to damages at a later time.

About time. It’s been quite a ride.

May 24, 2017May 24, 2017

Featured: Mexican beans

Paul Gepts, who should know, says that the bit of Mexico featured yesterday is pretty important:

This particular area of the state of Jalisco is part of the proposed Mesoamerican center of domestication of common bean (Kwak et al. 2009 Crop Sci.).

Here’s the relevant quote from that paper:

In the Mesoamerican gene pool, a single cluster groups most of the domesticated type, which confirms previous observations suggesting a single domestication located in the state of Jalisco form this gene pool (Gepts et al. 1986; Papa and Gepts 2003; Kwak et al. 2009).

May 23, 2017May 23, 2017

Mexican PGR from the air

The Atlantic had a feature last week on the Human Landscapes of Mexico showing Google Maps shots of different parts of the country. This kind of thing:

I mashed them up in Google Earth with the distribution of crop wild relatives, downloaded from Genesys. This is what I got for the environs of Guadalajara. The yellow dot is the site of the photo in The Atlantic‘s photo essay, the red circles collecting sites, mostly of wild beans.

Good thing those populations are in genebanks.

May 22, 2017

Before you ask…

Svalbard. Is. Fine.

Really.

May 22, 2017May 3, 2017

Brainfood: CWR use, Mainstreaming, Duplicates, Phaseolus model, Cherimoya diversity, Legume mixtures, ICRISAT pearl millet, Taste breeding, Rhubarb rhubarb, Plasticity, Seed dispersal

The Use of Crop Wild Relatives in Maize and Sunflower Breeding. In maize, unlike sunflower, it just hasn’t been worth it. Yet.
Securing sustainable and nutritious food systems through mainstreaming agricultural biodiversity: an interdisciplinary study. What works in Brazil won’t necessarily fly in India.
Duplication assessments in Brassica vegetable accessions. Half of 13 accession pairs/triplets with identical names from VIR and NordGen turned out to be morphologically identical.
Beans (Phaseolus ssp.) as a Model for Understanding Crop Evolution. 7 independent domestication “events” spread across 5 species and 2 continents makes for some interesting natural experiments.
A Mesoamerican origin of cherimoya (Annona cherimola Mill.). Implications for the conservation of plant genetic resources. Compare and contrast with above.
Highly productive forage legume stands show no positive biodiversity effect on yield and N2-fixation. Sometimes diversity doesn’t add much.
Genetic Resources of Pearl Millet: Status and Utilization. 22,888 accessions from 51 countries. Indian landraces: earliness, high tillering, high harvest index and local adaptation; African: bigger panicles, large seed size, and disease resistance.
Use of natural diversity and biotechnology to increase the quality and nutritional content of tomato and grape. Both are needed.
Rhubarb (Rheum species): the role of Edinburgh in its cultivation and development. From China, via Russia, with love.
Will phenotypic plasticity affecting flowering phenology keep pace with climate change? If the change is smaller than about 13 days.
Seed dispersers help plants to escape global warming. Because they move seed >35 m per decade uphill.