Latin America is home to dramatically diverse agroecological regions which harbor a high concentration of underutilized plant species, whose genetic resources hold the potential to address challenges such as sustainable agricultural development, food security and sovereignty, and climate change. This paper examines the status of an expert-informed list of underutilized crops in Latin America an...

Effective maintenance of crop diversity within farming systems has been the subject of many studies over the last decade. Although the benefits of agrobiodiversity have been widely recognised and encouraged through global conservation and policy awareness initiatives, its use is constrained due to the limited number plant breeders who can respond to all the needs of the poor farmers. Agrobiodiv...

Valuation of farmer knowledge has been seen as a route to promote sustainable use of plant genetic resources. In pineapple production systems in Benin, inadequate knowledge of cultivation practices can lead to a number of inconveniences including abandon of some varieties and cultivars. To understand how farmer's knowledge and cultivation practices impact the sustainable utilization of pineappl...

Rye (Secale cereale L.) is a cereal crop of major importance in many parts of Europe and rye breeders are presently very concerned with the restrict pool of rye genetic resources available. Such narrowing of rye genetic diversity results from the presence of "Petkus" pool in most modern rye varieties as well as "Petkus" × "Carsten" heterotic pool in hybrid rye breeding programs. Previous studie...

Climate has the potential to influence evolution, but how it influences the strength or direction of natural selection is largely unknown. We quantified the strength of selection on four floral traits of the subalpine herb Ipomopsis sp. in 10 years that differed in precipitation, causing extreme temporal variation in the date of snowmelt in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. The chosen floral traits...

Background The FAO (FAO, 1999; FAO/UNEP, 1995) is alerting the global community to the alarming figures in respect to domestic animal diversity. It estimates that about one third of the world's recognized 5000 livestock and poultry breeds are endangered and that breeds become extinct at the rate of one per week. Nevertheless, the subject has received much less attention than plant genetic diver...

Plant genetic resources are the major biological basis of the world food security. In all means they support the livelihoods of every life on planet earth. Biodiversity is the store house and acts as a cushion against potentially dangerous environmental changes and economic reforms. Such a buffer is facing threat due to manmade and ecological disasters. Hence, conservation of Biodiversity is co...

Genetic maps are important tools in plant genomics and breeding. The present study reports the large-scale discovery of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for genetic map construction in tea plant. We developed a total of 6,042 valid SNP markers using specific-locus amplified fragment sequencing (SLAF-seq), and subsequently mapped them into the previous framework map. The final map containe...

XIAOLONG YAN, PING WU, HONGQING LING, GUOHUA XU, FANGSEN XU and QIFA ZHANG* Laboratory of Plant Nutritional Genetics, Root Biology Center, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, China, State Key Laboratory of Plant Physiology and Biochemistry, College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310029, China, State Key Laboratory of Plant Cell and Chromosome Engineering, Ins...

The ecosystem services concept provides a means to define successful disease management more broadly, beyond short-term crop yield evaluations. Plant disease can affect ecosystem services directly, such as through removal of plants providing services, or indirectly through the effects of disease management activities, including pesticide applications, tillage, and other methods of plant removal...