AnnBot

A stand of very old trees, in an unexpected location, has yielded a coveted type of cacao tree. Usually, cacao trees are found along rivers, but these gems were found at a higher altitude than normal, and in Peru instead of Ecuador or Venezuela.
Collection expeditions in 2008 and 2009 through the Amazon Basin of Peru uncovered the exceptional find, along with other distinctive new populations of cacao. (Link pointed out by Rodomiro Ortiz)

Interactive hunger map and >Policy Brief: click on the timeline or select a country for national data. At close to one billion, the number of undernourished people in the world remains unacceptably high in 2010 despite an expected decline – the first in 15 years. The recent increase in food prices, if it persists, will create additional obstacles in the fight to further reduce hunger. The number is higher than before the food and economic crises of 2008-2009 and higher than the level that existed when world leaders agreed to reduce the number of hungry by half at the World Food Summit in 1996.

The Encyclopedia of Life (EoL), a free and collaborative website, said on Monday it now has pages for each of 750,000 species, meaning more than one-third of all the planet's 1.9m species are now covered.

Jennifer Preece, dean of the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland said, "There are many online sites dedicated to specific groups of species such as insects, birds or mammals. Not since Noah, however, has there been an effort like this to bring all the world's species together."

The site uses content from 180 partners to bring together images, videos and scientific information, including 35m pages of scanned literature created by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The new site allows members to create their own collection of species.

THE world’s average stock of chickens is almost 19 billion, or three per person, according to statistics from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Cattle are the next most populous breed of farm animal at 1.4 billion, with sheep and pigs not far behind at around 1 billion. China’s vast appetite helps make it the world leader in the number of chickens, pigs and sheep,

...one thing that I have found really interesting about the turn to speculative realism is that is has clearly been fuelled by online communities which have turned above all to blogs as an important means of swapping material, revealing first thoughts, and making revisions. I doubt that the growth of speculative realism would have been so insistent without these communities scattered all over the world, or so rapid. Why?

Plant science is central to addressing many of the most important questions facing humanity. Secure food production and quality remain key issues for the world in the 21st Century, and the importance of plants extends well beyond agriculture and horticulture as we face declining fossil fuel reserves, climate change, and a need for more sustainable methods to produce fuel, fibre, wood, and industrial feedstocks. There is also untapped potential in optimizing the nutritional properties of foods, and in identifying novel plant products such as medicines. Tackling these frontiers will require new scientific
methods and collaborations as existing approaches
are delivering incomplete answers.

 

Many of the most important questions that we have
identified can only be addressed by the integrated efforts of scientists with diverse expertise.

Introducing divergent thinking to education. A talk by Sir Ken Robinson, education and creativity thinker ... more than 5 million YouTube views, and an interesting presentation approach too.

A “hit list” of the ten invasive species which pose the biggest threat to
native wildlife on Britain’s waterways and cost £1.7bn a year to tackle has
been released by the Environment Agency.

Top 10 Invasive Species
Killer Shrimp
Water primrose
Floating pennywort
American Signal Crayfish
Top Mouth Gudgen
Giant Hogweed
Japanese Knotweed
Himalayan Balsam
Mink
Chinese Mitten Crab

 

EA press release at: http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/news/132112.aspx 

I am happy to see that Richard Nichols and colleagues from Queen Mary has re-started his outstanding podcasts again for the journal Heredity - they are always excellent summaries of the articles in the journal, including informative discussions with the authors. In the issue released at the end of July, features include comparisions of Arabidopsis thaliana and A. lyrata showing reduced tranposable element activity in A. thaliana, and the statistical analysis of molecular clocks.

 

Unless you have Apple hardware or iTunes continuously bugging you to update/slow down/crash your system, downloading is tricky and not described on the Genetics, Heredity/Nature or Queen Mary websites however! On a PC, go to http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/ranichols/podcast/july2011.mp3 or http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/ranichols/podcast/may2011.mp3 or http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/ranichols/podcast/January2011.mp3 (case-sensitive and different), and listen directly, or right-click and save-as in any directly you want to listen later.

An international team including Salk Institute plant biologist Joseph Ecker, describe their mapping and early analyses of thousands of protein-to-protein interactions within the cells of Arabidopsis thaliana. "With this one study we managed to double the plant protein-interaction data that are available to scientists," says Ecker,"This starts to give us a big, systems-level picture of how Arabidopsis works, and much of that systems-level picture is going to be relevant to - and guide further research on - other plant species, including those used in human agriculture and even pharmaceuticals."
In the paper, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6042/601.abstract , they note "Plants have unique features that evolved in response to their environments and ecosystems. A full account of the complex cellular networks that underlie plant-specific functions is still missing. We describe a proteome-wide binary protein-protein interaction map for the interactome network of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana containing about 6200 highly reliable interactions between about 2700 proteins. A global organization of plant biological processes emerges from community analyses of the resulting network, together with large numbers of novel hypothetical functional links between proteins and pathways. We observe a dynamic rewiring of interactions following gene duplication events, providing evidence for a model of evolution acting upon interactome networks. This and future plant interactome maps should facilitate systems approaches to better understand plant biology and improve crops."

Someday you’ll be able to use CAD software to draw up what you want a plant to look like and the software (containing detailed growth models) will tell you what genetic constructs you need to bring it into the world…

But for now we barely understand how natural morphological variation is controlled. So I was excited to see this paper out of the van der Knaap and Francis labs. In it, they review some of the known levers by which tomato plants control fruit shape and investigate their historical appearance.

Alien earthworms can alter the carbon and nitrogen cycles in woodland, as well as undermine native plant species, a study suggests.

Rolf Schlegel has put together an extensive list of all wheat varieties containing the 1RS.1BL translocation and recently updated his website at http://www.rye-gene-map.de/rye-introgression/. Recent surveys show that more than 45 % of breeding material may contain those translocations (Zhou et al. 2007) or 55% of CIMMYT bread wheat germplasm. This translocation has been deemed so important that it has been incorporated into >60 wheat varieties that occupy >50% of all developing country wheat area, almost 40 million hectares.

 

Illustration shows a wheat breeding line (2n = 6x + 2 = 44) with a pair of chromosome arms from rye (labeled green with genomic DNA from rye) translocated onto a wheat chromosome (1BL.1RS) and an additional chromosome pair from the wild species Thinopyrum bessarabicum (labeled red with genomic T bessarabicum DNA) from Trude Schwarzacher (eg Practical In Situ Hybridization, 2000, BIOS publishers).

Collaborate, Create, Communicate...

For years, we have been advocating the use of social media to inform as broad an audience as possible of our research and also to get our research outputs into the hands of people who can make them travel even further across their own communication networks and/or apply them to their own work. Nonetheless, not everyone understands the value of social media.

 

Although it’s heartening to see researchers the length and breadth of the CGIAR using social media to expand the reach of their research, communicate with colleagues in remote offices, and collaborate with scientists in other organizations, there is still much to be done. There are still staff who are a little wary of using social media, citing reasons like loss of privacy, lack of time and abuse of intellectual property rights. Some will tell you that social media is just another one of those things that add to the “noise” already on the Internet.

 

It usually takes time for all great inventions and innovations to become mainstream. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone took a while to catch on, as did cell phones and email. I wonder how we could possibly cope now without email or mobile communication devices. As such, I believe it will just be a matter of time before everyone realizes that social media has an important role to play in research.