- The genetic identity of the earliest human-made hybrid animals, the kungas of Syro-Mesopotamia. According to 4500 year old DNA, these super-donkeys were sterile crosses between female domestic donkeys and wild male asses. I guarantee nothing below will be as much fun as this.
- Haplotype analyses reveal novel insights into tomato history and domestication driven by long-distance migrations and latitudinal adaptations. I was wrong. Turns out tomatoes came about by one wild species evolving into a semi-domesticated one during a gradual migration from the Peruvian deserts to the Mexican rainforests and that fully domesticated Peruvian and Ecuadorian populations were the result of more recent back-migrations.
- Semi-natural habitats promote winter survival of wild-living honeybees in an agricultural landscape. Wrong again. Rare wild honeybees have been found in Galician power poles.
- High-resolution association mapping with libraries of immortalized lines from ancestral landraces. Actually, immortal landraces sound pretty cool too.
- From cultivar mixtures to allelic mixtures: opposite effects of allelic richness between genotypes and genotype richness in wheat. Mixtures of inbred lines are generally better than pure stands for coping with blotch disease, but sometimes specific allelic combinations undermine this. Well, ancient super-donkeys it ain’t, but still.
- Local communities’ perceptions of wild edible plant and mushroom change: A systematic review. The literature shows that local people are worried about the decreased abundance of the wild plants they rely on for food and nutrition security.
- Weeds Enhance Pollinator Diversity and Fruit Yield in Mango. That should be “weeds.” They’re not weeds if they’re actually useful. Maybe some of them are even edible.
- Multilateral benefit-sharing from digital sequence information will support both science and biodiversity conservation. We need a multilateral DSI benefit-sharing system which decouples access to DSI from sharing the benefits of DSI use. Where have I heard that before? And can I hear more about ancient hybrid super-donkeys instead?
- Diversity of Fusarium associated banana wilt in northern Viet Nam. The dreaded TR4 is still rare, but the pathogen lurks among the wild species too.
- Payments for Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources in Agriculture: One Size Fits All? I wonder what size would fit a hybrid super-donkey.
Bright future for Future Seeds
For the past few years, the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT has been building a beautiful, spacious, up-to-date, energy-efficient building to house its genebank on its research station at Palmira, Colombia. The old building was just no longer fit for purpose. Future Seeds will be inaugurated next week, on 15 March, and it’s already been getting some attention in the press, which I’m sure will ramp up over the next days. Watch out for more on the Alliance’s social media. One of the fun things the genebank is involved with, and which will no doubt be highlighted during the celebrations, is a collaboration with X’s Project Mineral on the robotic characterization of bean varieties in the field. Congratulations to all at Future Seeds, and very best wishes for the, well, future.
The three S’s of medieval salads
There’s a thread on the Twitter feed of The Delicious Legacy Podcast about that holy trinity of somewhat weird medieval root vegetables: skirret, salsify and scorzonera.
THREAD:
Skirret, Salsify, Scorzonera…
These are root vegetables, once popular, and eaten in almost every meal, in a pottage style stew mainly; it was the staple of many farmers…
What happened to them? Why don't we eat them any more?
1/x pic.twitter.com/V3iqLid9LZ— The Delicious Legacy Podcast (@DeliciousLegacy) March 6, 2022
If you don’t like the bird site, check it out on ThreadReader.
I’m not sure I agree with everything in there. For example, potato and sweetpotato can absolutely have complex flavours, and I doubt any of these three admittedly now marginal roots could ever have been described as staples. But it’s nice to be reminded of crops which are going out of fashion, and could presumably come back into it, given a little push.
Want to regenerate vegetables for CGN?
Interesting to see the Dutch national genebank outsource the regeneration of some of its vegetables to the private sector:
…CGN is looking for greenhouse growers who have expertise and greenhouse space available for the paid cultivation of vegetables (e.g. tomato, lettuce, spinach, melon) for seed production. The number of plants to be grown per seed sample varies per crop and ranges from 10-80 plants per seed sample.
Will be interesting to see if the market is there.
Brainfood: Ukrainian edition
- Characteristics of the resistance of spring wheat varieties to pathogens of leaf diseases typical for the zone of the Right-Bank Forest-Steppe of Ukraine. 3 of 19 varieties from the national genebank could be useful.
- The adaptability of soft spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) varieties. 3 of 10 accessions from the national genebank had high general adaptive ability.
- Investigation of the Carbohydrates of Camelina sativa (L.) Crantz and Camelina microcarpa Andrz. Levels of monosaccharides quantified in material from the national genebank.
- Characteristic of morphological traits and biochemical indicators in Linum pubescens. A flax wild relative with ornamental potential.
- Inheritance of productivity and its elements by hybrids and lines of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.). Lots of interesting variation to investigate further among F1-F6 hybrids.
- Combining ability of self-pollined sunflower lines – parents of confectionery hybrids. Tasty material derived from genebank accessions.
- Оil content in chickpea seeds of the national collection of Ukraine. Could do with more variation among the 43 accessions tested from the national genebank. But the whole collection is pretty important.
- Plant genetic resources of Ukrainian Podillia. Results of a 2019 collecting expedition by the national genebank.
- Genetic relatedness of sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) cultivars from Ukraine determined by microsatellite markers. Ukrainian cultivars combine genetic material of local, western European, and Caucasian origin.
- Characteristics of different varieties of the pea (Pisum sativum L.) in the zone of the Southern Forest-Steppe of Ukraine. Some of 30 newly introduced pea varieties might be useful in increasing productivity.
- Progress in Japanese quinces breeding in Ukraine. Since 1913!
- Molecular diversity in the Ukrainian melon collection as revealed by AFLPs and microsatellites. 38 accessions fall into the 3 standard genetic groups.
- The history of sunflowers in Ukraine. Not peer-reviewed, but anyway.