- Ancient DNA reveals 4000 years of grapevine diversity, viticulture and clonal propagation in France. Vegetative propagation of grapevines has been going on since the Iron Age.
- High-throughput olive germplasm classification using morphological phenotyping and machine learning. Olive may be generally vegetatively propagated, but you still have to characterize the fruits.
- Varietal Diversity Analysis of Date Palm and Identification of High Agro-Economic Genotypes in Middle Draa. About half of of the date palms in the middle Draa of Morocco are actually from seed. That makes their diversity difficult to conserve.
- Genebank tools for efficient management of viral infections in tropical clonal crops. All those clonal crops need to be kept clean in genebanks. Here’s how.
- Genome degradation in plant tissue culture. All those clonal crops also need to be kept genetically stable in genebanks, and it can be tricky.
Out of sight, full of bite
Drawing on crop data from the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Compendium of Forgotten Foods in Africa, CAFRI calculated Nutrient Density (ND) scores for a broad range of African foods, a measure of how much essential nutrition (vitamins, minerals, protein) each food delivers per calorie consumed.
Bottom line: eat your greens!
Uprooting crop diversity
Moving house is never any fun, but it’s particularly tricky for collections of crop diversity. You have to get the new facilities all ready, hundreds or even thousands of seed packets or test tubes or indeed live plants need to be kept safe and sound during the process, and then re-established in their new digs, and possibly new people may need to be hired and trained. Safe to say, you probably want to avoid relocating genebanks unless absolutely necessary, which is why it’s not all that common.
Surprising then to come across two examples within a few days.
The Domaine de Vassal grapevine collection in France 1 is being moved to save it from the encroaching waters of the Mediterranean. Or maybe it was a problem with the lease? Anyway, it’s been in the works for at least 10 years, but it does seem to be finally happening. Despite, ahem, some reservations.
The rub with the new proposed site is that only a portion of its soil is sand-based. The collection is destined for a hillside of limestone-clay soils where the vines would be grafted onto rootstock.
“A heresy!” Deiss protested, saying grafting compromises the authenticity of the vines.
In contrast, USDA’s National Soybean Germplasm Collection on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus 2 was supposed to be relocated in fiscal 2026, that was stopped by various stakeholders, but the whole thing is back on the agenda for fiscal 2027. The issue seems to be where the collection can be conserved most cost-effectively, but there may also be a bit of local politics involved as well. Predictably, I suppose.
“Having that vast collection so accessible to U. of I. researchers directly benefits Illinois farmers,” said Abigail Peterson, director of agronomy for the Illinois Soybean Association. “Whether it’s a new disease or soy oleic, I think the germplasm collection is the only avenue to explore and develop new traits. It’s just a huge tool in our toolbox.”
Good luck to the people involved in both cases. Whatever happens, I’m sure we all hope the collections remain safe and available for the long term.
Beat the heat with seeds
I haven’t yet had a chance to read the full FAO–WMO joint report on Extreme heat and agriculture, but some preliminary skimming reveals that agrobiodiversity does seem to be addressed, at least to some extent:
No mention of genebanks, mind you. I guess you can’t have everything, but you’d have thought the following snippets could easily have been used to make the case very explicitly for ex situ conservation of crop diversity.
For domesticated agricultural species, human influence on the genome through selective breeding for enhanced performance in increasingly homogenous production environments has resulted in a loss of natural genetic variability that have accentuated many species vulnerability to temperature extremes.
…
It is only through innovation and the implementation of adaptative measures (e.g.
selective breeding, making changes in the physical environment and altering management practices) that the global community can shelter agricultural activities from the larger forces of planetary human induced climate change.…
Switching to more resilient species to extreme heat may result in reduced genetic diversity, increasing the vulnerability of crops and livestock to large-scale losses due to a narrower genetic base.
A mycelial thread through human history
A very interesting, wide-ranging review in New Scientist makes the point that fungi were not for ancient humans the marginal resources that their near invisibility in the traditional archaeological record might suggest. In fact, they contributed to diets, health and social organisation, and even fire-making. Here’s a quick summary of what new analytical techniques in archaeology, sometimes linked with ethnography, are revealing, according to the article.
Fire technology (Mesolithic to Neolithic): Polypore fungi, especially Fomes fomentarius, were deliberately harvested, cut, scorched and processed into amadou. This is a felt-like, highly flammable material that people used as portable tinder, forming compact fire-starting kits together with birch bark and pyrite.
Food (Palaeolithic, including Neanderthals): Evidence from dental plaque DNA shows consumption of multiple species (e.g. gray shag, split gill, porcini), suggesting diets were more diverse than has been assumed. Mushrooms may partially explain isotopic signals previously attributed to meat consumption.
Medicine: A Neanderthal individual consumed grasses containing penicillin-producing mould, possibly to treat a dental abscess. Later, Ötzi the Iceman (~3300 BCE) carried amadou, but also birch polypore mushrooms. These may have had medicinal purposes (anti-parasitic, antimicrobial), though they were not found in the stomach, so a new hypothesis suggests they may have been used as fishing floats, based on morphology and experimental replication.
Subsistence and resource extraction: Polypores and puffballs may have been burned to produce smoke to anaesthetise bees, making harvesting honey a lot easier.
Fermentation (Neolithic): Moulds such as Monascus enabled enzymatic conversion of rice starch to sugars, facilitating alcohol production by the so-called “red qu” method. Pottery residues in East Asia show evidence of such brewing some 10,000 years ago, much earlier than originally thought. Fermented beverages were likely used in ritual, mortuary, and communal contexts and may have contributed to social cohesion, identity formation and early political and religious structures.