Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

November 8, 2022November 8, 2022

Sharing a hot plant pinup

The latest Eat This Newsletter is out. Here’s a taster. Do subscribe, well worth it. BTW, Jeremy has form on this topic.

The Plant Humanities Lab at Dumbarton Oaks apparently features the chilli pepper as its plant of the month this month, but as I cannot find a link there, I’m sending you to the version syndicated to JSTOR Daily. It’s a bit of a once-over-lightly, with little new for any reasonably well-informed chilli-head. While I’m carping, although the article says the seeds of wild chillies are spread by birds, it doesn’t mention any potential evolutionary advantage offered by capsaicin, the source of the heat. Clearly birds aren’t put off by it and humans can come to like it, but what is it actually for?

November 7, 2022November 7, 2022

Brainfood: Indigenous crops, Indian vegetables, Local breeds, Wheat identity, Date names, Food security & heritage, Peruvian cuisine, Food sovereignty, Palestinian seeds, Tea culture, Sacred groves, Food system transformation, Diverse landscapes

Renaming Indigenous crops and addressing colonial bias in scientific language. Orphan is out, Indigenous is in.
Vegetable Genetic Resources to Mitigate Nutritional Insecurity in India. How many of these Indian vegetables are Indigenous as opposed to indigenous though?
Farmers using local livestock biodiversity share more than animal genetic resources: Indications from a workshop with farmers who use local breeds. Farmers using local breeds don’t share colonial bias, I suspect. Or do they? Has anyone checked?
Because error has a price: A systematic review of the applications of DNA fingerprinting for crop varietal identification. Nobody’s perfect, even the colonially unbiased.
What lies behind a fruit crop variety name? A case study of the barnī date palm from al-‘Ulā oasis, Saudi Arabia. Local variety names are complicated, no wonder mistakes happen.
Food security and the cultural heritage missing link. Want to preserve cultural heritage AND boost productivity? Then support (1) preservation of genetic resources, (2) value addition, (3) traditional food processing, (4) preference matching, and (5) agritourism. What, no fighting colonial bias?
Analysis of Innovation in Peru’s Gastronomic Industry. All of the above?
Food sovereignty in sub-Saharan Africa: Reality, relevance, and practicality. All of the above are well and good, but not enough. You also need modern varieties. Just get their names right, eh?
Baladi Seeds in the oPt: Populations as Objects of Preservation and Units of Analysis. Whatever you do, don’t reduce cultural heritage to data.
Reinventing a Tradition: East Asian Tea Cultures in the Contemporary World. No danger of reducing tea to data, judging by this collection of papers.
Factors driving the tree species richness in sacred groves in Indian subcontinent: a review. Not religion, apparently, according to the data. Go figure.
The role of traditional knowledge and food biodiversity to transform modern food systems. There is plenty of evidence out there that bringing greater biodiversity into food systems results in multiple socio-cultural benefits. As this Brainfood, as well as the case studies in this paper, tries to show.
Complex agricultural landscapes host more biodiversity than simple ones: A global meta-analysis. Had enough?

November 4, 2022

A global overview of domestication

I think I may have missed the PNAS paper “Current perspectives and the future of domestication studies” when it came out in 2014. I certainly can’t seem to find it on the blog here. But I’m glad it got mentioned recently on Twitter because it has something I’ve been searching for on and off for a while now: a reasonably up-to-date timeline of crop and livestock domestication. Which I’m therefore happy to reproduce here. I’d love to read a global narrative of the history of domestication linking all these together.

October 24, 2022October 20, 2022

Brainfood: Opuntia breeding, Teosinte genes, Sugarcane breeding, Proso diversity, Watermelon diversity, Wheat pre-breeding, Sorghum wild relatives, Grasspea evaluation, Banana domestication, Pea pan-genome, Bambara diversity

Needs and strategies for breeding and sustainable use of genetic resources in Opuntia. Surely there are molecular markers for spinelessness by now?
Teosinte confers specific alleles and yield potential to maize improvement. There are 71 QTLs associated with 24 differential traits between maize and teosinte.
A short review on sugarcane: its domestication, molecular manipulations and future perspectives. Forget sugar or fuel, the future is vaccine production.
SNP discovery in proso millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) using low-pass genome sequencing. Ok, but why are the South Asian accessions so different from everything else?
Meta-analysis of qualitative and quantitative trait variation in sweet watermelon and citron watermelon genetic resources. Rob citron to pay sweet watermelon.
Genomics-informed prebreeding unlocks the diversity in genebanks for wheat improvement. How I learned to stop worrying and love non-adapted germplasm.
Wild Sorghum as a Promising Resource for Crop Improvement. Oooh, I like the idea of de novo domestication of Australian wild sorghum species.
Disentangling the Genetic Diversity of Grass Pea Germplasm Grown under Lowland and Highland Conditions. Always good to have multi-locational trial data, even when n=2.
Hybridization, missing wild ancestors and the domestication of cultivated diploid bananas. Let the search for the 3 unknown wild ancestors begin!
Improved pea reference genome and pan-genome highlight genomic features and evolutionary characteristics. If only Mendel had worked on wild peas too.
Genetic diversity and population structure analyses of South African Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea [L.] Verdc) collections using SNP markers. Two heterotic groups to play around with.

October 20, 2022October 21, 2022

The happiness of visiting genebanks

Sorry for the relative silence lately. Work intervened, involving a longish trip to Bhutan, to check out their national genebank. The specific project in question is the one we call BOLD. Check my insta for the inevitable, and inevitably classy, pix.

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