Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

February 19, 2021February 26, 2021

Watch and learn

The annual courses organized by Wageningen University on Plant Genetic Resources and Resilient Seed Systems for Sustainable Food Security and on Contemporary Approaches to Genetic Resources Conservation and Use will be online this year. Find out more and apply.

Oh, wait, so will EUCARPIA’s international conference on Breeding and Seed Sector Innovations for Organic Food Systems.

Anybody zoomed out yet?

February 18, 2021March 1, 2021

Toolbox tuber released

The Toolbox offers a collection of 11 tools that help diagnose, evaluate and improve seed systems of banana, cassava, potato, sweet potato, and yam. These tools can be used by researchers, policy makers, and practitioners working on seed systems of these crops.

Interested? The launch is on 2 March and you can register for the online event.

They’ll help with that pesky adoption gap, hopefully.

February 15, 2021February 5, 2021

Brainfood: Bird shit, Ancient Greece, Maize adaptation, Resistant peanut, Adaptive variation, Crop models, AA bananas, Wild wheat, Wild tomatoes, Switchgrass diversity, Phytosanitation, Rice breeding, Seeds 4 Needs double, Wild palm, Threatened biodiversity

‘White gold’ guano fertilizer drove agricultural intensification in the Atacama Desert from ad 1000. And maize was at the heart of it.
What’s new during the first millennium BCE in Greece? Archaeobotanical results from Olynthos and Sikyon. Not maize, alas, but what you’d expect, plus pine and sesame.
Local adaptation contributes to gene expression divergence in maize. Stress-response genes are the ones which have been selected. No word on whether any of them were important in the Atacama.
Genotyping tools and resources to assess peanut germplasm: smut-resistant landraces as a case study. Ok, so it sounds like the resistant line that was previously used is virtually identical to an accession in the USDA collection.
Do We Need to Identify Adaptive Genetic Variation When Prioritizing Populations for Conservation? No, but we’ll need it to prioritize use, surely?
Incorporating Realistic Trait Physiology into Crop Growth Models to Support Genetic Improvement. We’ll need better growth models too.
Wild to domesticates: genomes of edible diploid bananas hold traces of several undefined genepools. 3 of them, in fact, in both SE Asia and New Guinea.
Evolution of the bread wheat D-subgenome and enriching it with diversity from Aegilops tauschii. Three lineages were involved in the hybridizations that led to bread wheat. Coincidence?
De novo genome assembly of two tomato ancestors, Solanum pimpinellifolium and Solanum lycopersicum var. cerasiforme, by long-read sequencing. Thousands of genes not found in the cultivated crop, apparently.
Genomic mechanisms of climate adaptation in polyploid bioenergy switchgrass. Introgression from the northern genepool (one of three) was really important in adaptation after the glaciers retreated. Gene duplication also involved in adaptation.
Economic Studies Reinforce Efforts to Safeguard Specialty Crops in the United States. Where “safeguard” means “provide clean planting material.”
Comparative analysis of genetic diversity of rice (Oryza sativa L.) varieties cultivated in different periods in China. Diversity went up, then down, between the 1980s and the 2010s.
Wheat Varietal Diversification Increases Ethiopian Smallholders’ Food Security: Evidence from a Participatory Development Initiative. Why the diversity in breeding programmes is important, and how farmer participation can help maintain it.
The tricot citizen science approach applied to on-farm variety evaluation: methodological progress and perspectives. How to do the above.
Biodiversity and conservation of Phoenix canariensis: a review. A wild relative in trouble, and what to do about it.
Tropical and Mediterranean biodiversity is disproportionately sensitive to land-use and climate change. As can be seen from the above.

February 10, 2021

Attentive readers will know that I occasionally post references to Genesys, and sometimes even links to Genesys outputs, such as search results and maps. Some revision for inattentive readers: Genesys is a database that brings together passport data on accessions from multiple genebanks, and a web interface which allows you to explore the database in different ways.

Here I just wanted to point out three recent improvements:

The huge amount of data from the USDA genebank system has been updated.
The “how to use Genesys” blurb has been totally redone, hopefully for the better.
A nifty little functionality which compares the passport data of accessions to identify possible duplicates has been added.

Any questions or suggestions, leave them below, and we’ll try to address them.

February 10, 2021February 10, 2021

Seed storage seminars

The second Plantum Seed Technology Webinar is online tomorrow, 11 February at 3-4 PM CET. Register here.

Jeremy Pardo (Van Buren lab, Michigan State University)
Co-option of seed dehydration pathways during drought and desiccation in grasses: Some grasses can survive typically lethal drought events through entering a dormant, desiccated state until the return of water. We aimed to find what distinguishes this unique desiccation tolerance response from conserved drought responses observed in all grasses. This study was done in collaboration with a.o. Henk Hilhorst (Wageningen University and Research).
Jae-Sung Lee (International Rice Research Institute)
Exploring anti-ageing properties in rice seeds: Specific seed metabolites such as anti-oxidants are known improve seed longevity. Based on metabolomic and genomic analyses, a few metabolites belonging to vitamin, flavonoid and amino acid groups were associated with seed longevity in rice. Using SNPs we identified the DNA-haplotypes regulating the accumulation of these metabolites. This study was done in collaboration with Fiona Hay (Aarhus University).

Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

Posts

Watch and learn

Toolbox tuber released

Brainfood: Bird shit, Ancient Greece, Maize adaptation, Resistant peanut, Adaptive variation, Crop models, AA bananas, Wild wheat, Wild tomatoes, Switchgrass diversity, Phytosanitation, Rice breeding, Seeds 4 Needs double, Wild palm, Threatened biodiversity

More light on Genesys

Seed storage seminars