Brainfood: Rice breeding, Sorghum parents, Cowpea diversity, Sweet potato double, Lesser yam uses, Tomato breeding, Peanut hybrids, Rice wild relatives, Sorghum genetic erosion
- Future flooding tolerant rice germplasm: Resilience afforded beyond Sub1A gene. You want to make rapid breeding progress? You need the “Transition from Trait to Environment” approach. As far as I can tell, this means that you fix your trait of interest in a pool of elite parents before using it in proper yield breeding.
- Prioritizing parents from global genebanks to breed climate-resilient crops. Yeah but how do you find your trait of interest in the first place. You start with passport and genotyping data from genebank collections of course.
- Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L. Walp.) landraces in Mozambique and neighbouring Southern African countries harbour genetic loci with potential for climate adaptation. You see what I mean?
- Genetic diversity and population structure of Colombian sweet potato genotypes reveal possible adaptations to specific environmental conditions. Ok, now do you see what I mean?
- Genetic diversity analysis and duplicates identification of new sweetpotato accessions collected in China. Manage your duplicates though, right?
- The lesser yam Dioscorea esculenta (Lour.) Burkill: a neglected crop with high functional food potential. This doesn’t have decent collections, let alone duplicates.
- Molecular screening of wild and cultivated tomato germplasm reveals potential materials for multi-locus disease resistance breeding. Again, thank goodness for genebanks — plural.
- First report on trait segregation in F1 hybrids between the cultivated peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) and the wild incompatible species A. glabrata Benth. I wonder if this could be used in tomato.
- A blueprint for tapping the wild relatives for crop improvement: A success story of CWR-derived rice varieties, Nông Dân 1 and Nông Dân 2. No need for embryo rescue here. No word on the need for submergence tolerance.
- Genetic diversity in in situ and ex situ collections of sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] landraces. Diversity is still out there, at least in India. Which is great. But how would you know without genebanks? And you need genebanks for breeders to use it.
- And to cap things off, a new occasional feature: A ChatGPT-generated one-sentence summary of the week’s Brainfood. “To breed crops for climate resilience and future food security, you need to systematically mine, manage, and mobilize the diversity stored in genebanks—especially landraces and wild relatives—and integrate it into elite breeding pipelines using smart, trait-targeted strategies.”
