Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

February 25, 2015February 25, 2015

Featured: MGIS

Max Ruas addresses some of the nerdy MGIS issues we raised:

Regarding the USDA collection based in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, we will correct the FAO CODE in order to be compliant with Genesys, in particular since MGIS is a data provider of Genesys. Then, for the discrepancy of accessions count, this is due to the fact that we now make visible only alive accessions while we provided to Genesys also with lost and eliminated accessions some month ago. It will be fixed as well for consistencies reasons.

Thanks for listening, Max. We look forward to future releases.

February 25, 2015February 27, 2015

Nice to see crop wild relatives highlighted in several places in Kew’s new science strategy. Full disclosure: I work with the Millennium Seed Bank on CWR for my day job. But that was no guarantee that the subject would get such a high profile in the science strategy.

February 24, 2015February 24, 2015

Peachy photos online

Not only is U.P. Hedrick’s magisterial The Peaches of New York on Open Library. The images are also on Flickr, under Internet Archive Book Images. Mouthwatering.

February 24, 2015February 24, 2015

Featured: Portuguese grapevine

José Antão reacts to a Brainfood snippet about grapevine genetic resources conservation in Portugal (pdf):

The Portuguese are under-staffed. Pretty much all the work on intra-varietal diversity is done by Elsa Gonçalves and Antero Martins and their organization (Porvid). They give an example of one of the Portuguese native grapes with economic importance, but there are several dozens used in commercial vineyards and hundreds in the collections. Plus every once in a while they find a new variety that hadn’t been described previously. It’s a run against time, while increasing numbers of populations are eliminated (substituted by more fashionable varieties and commercially available clones).

February 23, 2015February 24, 2015

Brainfood: Grape genetics & conservation, Ecosystem restoration & services, Collecting cycads, Pigeonpea genomics, Wild pigeonpea gaps, Breadfruit collection diversity, Banana collection diversity, Conserving mammals, Bhutanese cereal diversity, Potato nutrition

The preservation of genetic resources of the vine requires cohabitation between institutional clonal selection, mass selection and private clonal selection. Intra-varietal diversity, that is. They apparently do it best in Portugal.
Association of dwarfism and floral induction with a grape ‘green revolution’ mutation. Cool things I learned from this paper: 1. Pinot Meunier is a periclinal mutant. 2. Tendrils are inflorescences. 3. Dwarf grapes are dwarf for the same reason dwarf wheat is dwarf. No word on what the Portuguese are doing about it. And the fact that the paper is over 10 years old is irrelevant to its coolness.
Quantifying the impacts of ecological restoration on biodiversity and ecosystem services in agroecosystems: A global meta-analysis. Supporting ecosystem services go up 40% on average, regulating ES by 120%. Well worth having.
Can a Botanic Garden Cycad Collection Capture the Genetic Diversity in a Wild Population? Yes, but need to “(1) use the species biology to inform the collecting strategy; (2) manage each population separately; (3) collect and maintain multiple accessions; and (4) collect over multiple years.” Maybe they should talk to the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden guys.
Genebanking Seeds from Natural Populations. It’s more difficult than with crops. And then you’ve got the above.
Genomics-assisted breeding for boosting crop improvement in pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan). “…pigeonpea has become a genomic resources-rich crop and efforts have already been initiated to integrate these resources in pigeonpea breeding.” And now we wait.
Crop wild relatives of pigeonpea [Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp.]: Distributions, ex situ conservation status, and potential genetic resources for abiotic stress tolerance. 15 of them need collecting. And, presumably, genotyping (see above).
Diversity in the breadfruit complex (Artocarpus, Moraceae): genetic characterization of critical germplasm. 349 individuals from 255 accessions are 197 unique genotypes from 129 lineages.
Musa spp. Germplasm Management: Microsatellite Fingerprinting of USDA–ARS National Plant Germplasm System Collection. Used to identify mislabelled in vitro accessions. Data in GRIN-Global.
Education and access to fish but not economic development predict chimpanzee and mammal occurrence in West Africa. Having fish to eat means you leave chimpanzees alone.
Community Perspectives on the On-Farm Diversity of Six Major Cereals and Climate Change in Bhutan. About 30% of varieties lost over last 20 years. But what does it mean that “93% of the respondents manage and use agro-biodiversity for household food security and livelihood”? What exactly does that other 7% of farmers do?
Amino acid composition and nutritional value of four cultivated South American potato species. S. goniocalyx is best for you. But does it taste any good?

Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

Posts

Featured: MGIS

Kew does crops

Peachy photos online

Featured: Portuguese grapevine

Brainfood: Grape genetics & conservation, Ecosystem restoration & services, Collecting cycads, Pigeonpea genomics, Wild pigeonpea gaps, Breadfruit collection diversity, Banana collection diversity, Conserving mammals, Bhutanese cereal diversity, Potato nutrition