- Selection of the most informative morphoagronomic descriptors for cassava germplasm. From 51 to 32. Hardly seems worth it. And dropping descriptors can be dangerous.
- Advances in core collection of plant germplasm resources. In Chinese, alas, but it sounds intriguing.
- Trends in breeding oat for nutritional grain quality – An overview. You want high β-glucan, and you can get it by breeding for high yield, luckily. A. atlantica has high β-glucan.
- Indigenous Fruit Trees of Tropical Africa: Status, Opportunity for Development and Biodiversity Management. Need for “exploiting the under-tapped treasuries of IFT.” Still? People have been saying that for years. They’ve even designated agroforestry systems as globally important and everything.
- Promoting Santalum yasi Seeman (Sandalwood or yasi) in agroforestry systems to reverse agrodeforestation in Fiji. An attempt to introduce a high value species into a threatened agroforestry system. Not just fruit, then.
- Genetic diversity and population structure of wild/weedy eggplant (Solanum insanum, Solanaceae) in southern India: Implications for conservation. Quite a lot of geneflow.
- The potential for crop to wild hybridization in eggplant (Solanum melongena; Solanaceae) in southern India. Transgenes from the crop could spread to the wild relative.
- Variation in Antioxidant Activity and Flavonoid Aglycones in Eggplant (Solanum melongena L.) Germplasm. So, the leaves are good for you. But I suspect they taste like crap.
- The Qingyuan Mushroom Culture System as Agricultural Heritage. Would pay money to see that.
- Selecting High Amylose Rice Germplasm Combined with NIR Spectroscopy at the RDA Genebank Conserved. From 9481 to 14 with high amylose and decent agronomy. But why bother?
- Field response of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) to high temperature. There are some heat tolerant lines in the ICRISAT genebank.
- Genetic diversity in East African finger millet (Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertn) landraces based on SSR markers and some qualitative traits. The diversity is high, mainly within countries, and missing from the ICRISAT minicore. Naughty.
- Analyses based on the 16S rRNA and secA genes identify a new phytoplasma subgroup associated with a lethal yellowing-type disease of coconut in Côte d’Ivoire. The international genebank is threatened.
- New Insights into Capsicum spp Relatedness and the Diversification Process of Capsicum annuum in Spain. Limited genetic diversity has differentiated in Spain into pungent, elongated peppers in the South and Center, and sweet, blocky and triangular types in the North.
- Knowing native potatoes: finding local experts through innovative methods in the Peruvian Andes. Community Biodiversity Register methodology applied to potato landraces. Don’t see anything much new here, but good to have it nicely documented.
Is cocoa still cursed?
It is always fun seeing what other people do with a story you’re reasonably familiar with. So it was listening to The Chocolate Curse, a recent episode of Planet Money. 1
Long story short: Ecuador’s fabled cacao industry went bust in the 1920s because all the wonderful old trees fell prey to witches’ broom. Along comes a diminutive, independent cacao breeder who, on his 51st cross, produced a diminutive cacao tree that is resistant to witches broom. Alas, the variety, called CCN51, tastes like “rusty nails,” and worse. That’s it in the picture.
We’ve actually been here before: Unintended consequences of cacao breeding. What has changed, according to Planet Money, is that the big chocolate manufacturers have found ways to make use of the less than tasty CCN51 beans. Ecuador has planted it like there’s no tomorrow, and it has spread to lots of other cacao-producing areas too.
Yay!
Two things surprised me about the story, as told by Planet Money.
1. Nobody seemed to think that, having seen their original cacao industry devastated by a disease, a similar thing might possibly happen when more than half of the cacao trees in Ecuador are just one variety.
2. Having seen their original cacao industry wiped out by a disease, nobody made the connection with the fruit Ecuador is even better known for: bananas.
There’s more to kiwi fruit diversity than you think
I love photos of weird plants, and the Facebook group Rare Fruit-Rare Edible Plants is a great place to find them. Once in a while, you even get a photo of diversity in a weird plant, which is even better. Case in point is this great visual summary of diversity in Actinidia. Except of course the Facebook version had no caption, which was annoying as hell. Fortunately, thanks to Google Image Search, I was able to track down the original source, a 2008 paper in BMC Genomics. Now, where can I get some of these to taste?
Bottleneck slides
Try and find an illustration of the domestication bottleneck — to put in a slide for a presentation, say — and likely as not you end up with some variation on a classic theme, this particular version being from the great Teacher-Friendly Guide to the Evolution of Maize:
That’s fine for some purposes, but sometimes you want real data, and then you might use this:
But I don’t really find that particularly striking, do you? And that’s why I really got excited about Fig. 1c in a recent paper about patterns of genomic diversity in a bunch of soybean accessions, ranging from wild populations to modern varieties. It’s really tiny in the paper, so I’ve blown it up here, at the expense of some quality:
I think this really shows very compellingly how the genetic diversity space shrinks and shifts as you move from wild soya to modern varieties. You don’t even really need to know that the axes are principal component scores or indeed how diversity was measured. But is this kind of diagram common out there? I can’t remember seeing anything quite this clear, and some rapid googling drew a blank too. Well, perhaps I read the wrong journals.
So here’s a question for you: what’s your favourite illustration of the domestication bottleneck, using real data? If we get a decent number of examples, I’ll try to put them all together in a post, and maybe even organize a vote.
Featured: You say konbucha
Julia M. Schumann begs to differ with Jeremy on a point of Japanese linguistics:
In reference to the spelling question of konbucha (or kombucha) vs kobucha, I think that it was not so much a spelling mistake on the part of either author as a case of multiple pronunciations for the same meaning.
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