Category: Uncategorized

CHESTNUT REVIVAL PROJECT. "One of four trees in the great North American forest of yesteryear would have been a chestnut, since felled nearly entirely by a fungal blight imported from Asia ... work splices genetic resistance to the disease into the American chestnut genome ...attempt to breed the tree with its blight-resistant counterpart from China." http://lnkd.in/dYTym8q View in LinkedIn

HEIRLOOM PLANT CULTIVARS. "An heirloom plant ... is an old cultivar that is "still maintained by gardeners and farmers particularly in isolated or ethnic communities". These may have been commonly grown during earlier periods in human history, but are not used in modern large-scale agriculture." http://lnkd.in/dY-cnQU View in LinkedIn

SAHARA DUST STORMS HIT EUROPE. Flying back from a Tokyo to Barcelona, I was deeply struck by a thin yellow ring above European clouds. This was not visible from the earth, looking up through the thin ring, but only when looking parallel along the ring from the plane, or on the far sunset horizon. This fine particulate matter turned to sticky mud at my home upon washing. http://lnkd.in/dzWNf3m View in LinkedIn

FOOD INSECURITY IS ONLY 50 years old. "The increasing worldwide dependency on few crops leaves humankind vulnerable to crop failures. This has occurred in only the last 50 years, with the advent of the 'globalized diet'... a third of today's diversity could disappear by 2050." http:/http://lnkd.in/dRrRmFY View in LinkedIn

MONOCULTURE REDUCED DIVERSITY. "Before the industrialization of agriculture, a much wider variety of plant foods were grown for human consumption. In modern agriculture in the industrialized world, most food crops are now grown in large, monocultural plots ... Heirloom gardening is a reaction against this trend." http://lnkd.in/dY-cnQU View in LinkedIn

SO-CALLED GREEN REVOLUTION KILLED CROP DIVERSITY. "In India farmers have planted 30,000 different varieties of rice over the past 50 years. With the advent of green revolution varieties, this has changed. It is estimated that 75% of all rice fields in India were planted to just 10 varieties in 2005!" http://people.oregonstate.edu/~muirp/cropdiv.htm View in LinkedIn

ANCIENT DNA. "DNA has been reported to have been isolated from a variety of organisms up to a hundred million years old ... however, that many experimental artifacts are associated with the study of ancient DNA and in several cases the DNA purported to have been of ancient origin has been shown to be due to contamination." http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724634.1999.10011118 View in LinkedIn

US CROP DIVERSITY. "Over 90% of the varieties grown 100 years ago are no longer in commercial production ... In 1903, US seed catalogs listed 408 pea varieties; only 25 can be found now ... and by 1970, just two pea varieties comprised 96% of the US commercial crop. 71% of US corn acreage in 1991 was planted to just six varieties." http://people.oregonstate.edu/~muirp/cropdiv.htm View in LinkedIn

DNA SEQUENCING: "Coddington likened the improvement in sequencing technology to the dawn of commercial spaceflight over the past several years. "Think about the NASA program of the early '60s—it cost billions of dollars to get a couple of people to the moon, and now we're doing boutique spaceflight." http://lnkd.in/dtVxkW6 View in LinkedIn

"CROP DIVERSITY is part of the biological diversity and contributes towards achieving food security, poverty alleviation, environmental protection and sustainable development. Crop diversity is being eroded rapidly ... Genetic variation ... is essential for crop improvement." http://lnkd.in/dZ4Q-nq View in LinkedIn