- Unexpected Diversity during Community Succession in the Apple Flower Microbiome. Could be important in disease management.
- Plant Tissue Culture: A Useful Measure for the Screening of Salt Tolerance in Plants. But lots of different ways to do it.
- Fisheries: Does catch reflect abundance? Some. But probably not enough. Here’s the industry spin. And the NY Times does a number on it.
- Plant-Pollinator Interactions over 120 Years: Loss of Species, Co-Occurrence and Function. Extinctions and phenological shifts have occurred, but the system has shown resilience. It is unlikely, however, to continue to do so.
- Wild Pollinators Enhance Fruit Set of Crops Regardless of Honey Bee Abundance. Don’t you sometimes wish titles left something to the imagination? NPR breaks it down for ya, but doesn’t add much to the title.
- Continental estimates of forest cover and forest cover changes in the dry ecosystems of Africa between 1990 and 2000. About 20 Mha of forest loss, not 34 Mha. Still too much, though. But how did FAO get it so wrong?
- Robustness and Strategies of Adaptation among Farmer Varieties of African Rice (Oryza glaberrima) and Asian Rice (Oryza sativa) across West Africa. Local varieties can scale out. And should be used in breeding.
- Genetic and life-history changes associated with fisheries-induced population collapse. Phenotypic changes during Eurasian perch Baltic Sea fisheries collapse could be evolution, but when you look at the genetics it looks more like immigration of unadapted interlopers. Which might be bad for recovery.
- Variable activation of immune response by quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) prolamins in celiac disease. Quinoa may be gluten-free, but it can still give you grief, and some varieties are far worse than others.
- Social exchange and vegetative propagation: An untold story of British potted plants. It’s artificial selection, Jim, but not as we know it.
- Wheat Cultivar Performance and Stability between No-Till and Conventional Tillage Systems in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Tested 21 cultivars for performance under late-planted no-till system and — guess what? — performance varied.
- Genetic diversity and structure in Asian native goat analyzed by newly developed SNP markers. They originated in W Asia, and then admixtured (admixed?) in the E to different extents. Yeah, I thought we knew that already too, but scientists gotta make a living.
- A Bountiful Harvest: Genomic Insights into Crop Domestication Phenotypes. The mutations that underpinned domestication came in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Like this one in maize, for example.
The unlikely origin of Venere
An Italian walks into a genebank… No, not the beginning of a tasteless joke. But still rather a funny story, so bear with me. The genebank is that of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and the Italian visitor naturally starts discussing Italian rice with the (non-Italian) genebank manager. In particular, he tells him about this strange black rice they have in Italy, great tasting and great for the health, an old traditional Italian variety, dating back to time immemorial. Venere, it is called. Does the IRRI genebank, the largest rice genebank in the world after all, perhaps have it?
So the IRRI genebank manager, who likes that sort of challenge, does a bit of googling, and a bit of trawling of the various databases at his command. And what should he discover, but that the old traditional Italian variety actually traces back to a donation made by IRRI 22 years back. Yes, records agree that in 1991 IRRI sent a sample of a black rice from Indonesia (IRGC 17863, local name “Ketan Gubat”), collected in 1972 in a place called Yogyakarta, to W.X. Ren at the Italian seed company Sardo Piemontese Sementi. Venere is a descendant of Ketan Gubat.
Helping develop a new market in speciality rice has not traditionally been counted among IRRI’s impacts. There’s a first time for everything, I suppose. But there’s a bigger point here. How do you monitor this kind of impact pathway in a systematic way? Continuously chase literature on the use of all the hundreds of accessions a genebank sends out? Unlikely. 1 No, what you really need is a curious visitor who knows a particular variety walking into your genebank.
Poppy row blooms in Tasmania
Tasmania is convulsed by a row over the shortage of raw material to process into stuff euphemistically labelled “Concentrate of Poppy Straw“. A hint: you can get four kinds of CPS: morphine, thebaine, oripavine and codeine. In response, the government gave one of the processors permission to import 2000 tonnes of raw poppy capsules from Turkey. And in response to that Tasmania’s Legislative Council is holding an enquiry. It’s a bizarre situation, not least because, as long-time readers will know, we find it really hard to understand why Papaver somniferum is encouraged there and exterminated elsewhere.
Reading one newspaper report, there seem to be two ideas at work. One is that the import of 2000 tonnes — around 150-200 containers — poses a huge bio-security risk, presumably from invasive alien plants. And then there’s the question of why there is a shortage of home grown poppy. A commenter says the price he has been offered is too low and that a lot of growers will be anadoning the crop unless profits improve.
Ah, the perils of globalisation. I’m sure TPI Enterprises chose Turkey because it is the cheapest source of the raw material.
p.s. If you’re really interested, you could always apply to become a poppy grower in Tasmania. h/t Brendan Koerner.
“Cromwo” unmasked as Ozoroa insignis
Does anyone know what the scientific name might be for the tree known as cromwo in Pokot #kenya @icraf @cifor_forets
— Luigi Guarino (@AgroBioDiverse) February 28, 2013
For the past week I’ve been in a bit of a tiz trying to identify a tree. Of course I searched for cromwo online, but all that turned up was an echo-chamber in which the “information” originally provided went round and round in a self-congratulatory cacophony. We did get some helpful hints of where to look, but they turned up empty too. “Forget it, Jeremy, it’s Chinatown,” someone said. Like Jake Gittes, I couldn’t do that.
And then it hit me. One of my longest-standing and, I like to think, deepest friendships is with a very famous writer and activist who, when we met, had just returned from an ethnobotanical study among … the Pokot! But that was then. Might she know?
I fired off an email. She fired back a reply designed to prepare me for the worst. And then, bingo!
This is your lucky day!
Kromwo is, according to the Kenyan Agriculture and Research Institute’s Agriculture Research Department’s report on the plants I collected (dated 10th april 1979), Ozoroa insignis Del. (Anacardiaceae)
Plural is Kram.
Certainly was! She’d also dutifully noted one of the uses for kromwo:
Burn and mix with milk for flavour.
I cannot describe how happy this made me, because with a formal scientific name, the “correct” transliteration being not much help, it is possible to go looking for additional information. You can find photographs, scientific investigations of the plant’s biochemical properties, misleading English names, and loads of other stuff.
Scientific names really do matter.
New HQ for CGIAR
Ground broken yesterday in Montpellier. Very impressive. But am I the only one sees a striking visual metaphor or two in this architectural vision?