Thread by @JorgeCBerny

Beans are getting popular and they have helped me endure grad school. I´ll post some of my favorites while this pandemic endures.

Tzama´ are mostly grown in Southern Mexico, Belize and Guatemala. Planted later, as a relay after maize, with a shorthish cycle. Tasty AF.

For example this is G15805
genebank.ciat.cgiar.org/genebank/bacce…

Collected in Belize in 1976!

@santicosbarrera grew some of that type at the Quilichao station in 2018

Also in Quilichao, G35346, a P. coccineus was planted as check for aluminum tolerance, as it is a parent of some common bean lines with improved Al tolerance.

genebank.ciat.cgiar.org/genebank/bacce…

G40111 is a Tepary bean collected by Debouck in 1979 in the Yucatan Peninsula, way out of the normal range range, at low elevation. It has relatively large leaves and looks like a climber, as if it was selected for milpa. But low yielder.
genebank.ciat.cgiar.org/genebank/bacce…

Taking a break from not being able to concentrate to promote the consumption of lima beans (P. lunatus). They have a bad rep in the US, probably because the canned stuff. But they are productive, very tasty, cook fast. This is some variation of the Yucatan Peninsula.

For example Puksi’ik’al tsutsui is a common lunatus in Yucatan. In Maya it means the heart of tsutsui. Tsusuit is a bird - Columba palumbus.

genebank.ciat.cgiar.org/genebank/bacce…
genebank.ciat.cgiar.org/genebank/bacce…

Lima beans are also one of the pulses with the more area/production in California.
Check out this old (1918) publication of bean production in CA.
hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/…

@plgepts leads the CA lima bean breeding. Mainly for large limas.

Ok now back to trying to concentrate, anxiety and panic.

Back to Southeast Mexico. Phaseolus lunatus varieties (and other crops) are named by the seed shape and coat color and/or phenology.

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

X'mejen ib are the earliest, flat shaped, not photoperiod sensitive (of the little I've seen of this stuff in CA). We have used some of this and I think there's a lot of potential to improve both bushy and climbing varieties.

genebank.ciat.cgiar.org/genebank/bacce…
genebank.ciat.cgiar.org/genebank/bacce…

White seeded landraces have been displacing the colored.

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Not sure, but it seems that white seeds are more marketable, milpa farmers are less isolated and more market oriented. Lima beans are usually twice as expensive as common bean.

These are most of the common whites.

Also for some reason I've found the very round ones have lower germination.

genebank.ciat.cgiar.org/genebank/bacce…
genebank.ciat.cgiar.org/genebank/bacce…
genebank.ciat.cgiar.org/genebank/bacce…

And... back to COVID despair

This is some variation in seeds and pods of wild and domesticated common bean.

Look at how twisted the pod of the wild is.

Wilds and some domesticates pods usually twist strongly when dry. This enhances shattering.

Check out Travis Parker's et al. paper on shattering

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

These are wild common beans a while ago. I made crosses of 3 wilds from wet to dry environments
genebank.ciat.cgiar.org/genebank/bacce…
genebank.ciat.cgiar.org/genebank/bacce…
npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/acc…
To SEA 5, and elite breeding line from @BiovIntCIAT_eng

And developed 3 RIL nested populations, with one backcross. In the pic each seed is from one RIL.

We evaluated and genotype them at @UCDavisPlants veg crops fields.

All in collaboration with @erkonzen of Universidade de São Paulo, and Antonia Palkovic and @plgepts of course.

Which resulted in: Exploration of the Yield Potential of Mesoamerican Wild Common Beans From Contrasting Eco-Geographic Regions by Nested Recombinant Inbred Populations

frontiersin.org/article/10.338…

A graph that didn't make it is this genetic PC of the pops, parents and F1`s. Cool to see what one backcross does, and that PI 417653 (G12910) is closer to the SEA 5. Kwak et al. (2009) detected it as part of the wild clade closer to the domesticates.
dl.sciencesocieties.org/publications/c…

Ok. Less boring stuff. Pictures!

This are flowers of P. coccineus (runner bean) on the left, common bean on the right, and the interspecific cross in the middle.

Here is this interesting graph about the hypothetical Archaic (~8000 BC) food system in West Mesoamerica.

"...(wild) beans could be incorporated into the diet without boiling, but just by toasting, stone grinding, and baking in corn dough tamales"

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

On that same paper

It's also rare that reading a paper makes oneself hungry.

Following that story of food systems and domestication, probably wild beans were somehow a companion "weed" to teosinte, and then to maize. IMHO.

Wild beans still appear alongside teosinte. Like this one that @jrossibarra found in Michoacan.

https://twitter.com/jrossibarra/status/668669661249011712

And @plgepts found this one in Jalisco.

If time travel was like a thing, it would be awesome to go back 7k years to central-west Mexico and see how the milpa system developed.

There's this cool paper: "Origin of agriculture and plant domestication in West Mesoamerica" By Zizumbo and Colunga.
link.springer.com/article/10.100…

There are a lot of interesting features about the milpa system. One is the complementarity of the root system of the 3 main species.

And a pic of how a milpa looks these days.

academic.oup.com/aob/article/11…

Squash is pretty cool too. Lot's of diversity.
There's a pic of the fruit diversity that a single farmer had in Yucatan, while I was doing some bean collecting some years ago.
And another pic of stuff I grew at the Student Farm in @ucdavis

Tepary beans make a well deserved appearance in the book Seeds of Resistance by @schapiro

Also in the same book:

There´s some Tepary beans trying their luck in the scorching heat of Yucatan.

Debouck collected two accessions in the neighboring state in the late 70´s. Not know if they were widespread at some point or later introductions. All gone.
Will be interesting to see how they perform

More bean content for the mitigation of pandemic distress .

More specifically on Tepary beans which "can play a small but significant role towards sustainability".

This is, of course, an understatement, from: Tepary Bean – an ideal arid zone crop
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

From the same publication: Morphology, area of distribution, and some of the seed diversity.

Vavilov himself observed the drought adaptation of Tepary beans when visiting Hopi and Navajo mesas in Arizona in 1930

journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/j…

But if you want to lear A LOT about Tepary beans there is the MSc! dissertation of Gary Nabhan @Ferhat9282468.
repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/5…
This is a remarkable document.

Luckily for the world, Gary and @NativeSeedsSRCH have kept their belief and outreach for teparies.

BTW, buy seeds and/or donate to @NativeSeedsSRCH. They do great work and have lots of cool stuff to plant -> eat.

npr.org/sections/thesa…

Maize became a staple in the mountains of Belize about 4,000 years ago

Surprisingly beans are not mentioned in the paper at all, and it might be that is because it is obvious that everybody was enjoying eating beans since time immemorial.

advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/23/e…

https://twitter.com/JorgeCBerny/status/1319055668956090369

Some lima, common and tepary beans started flowering as a part of what I call borderline breeding. Using some leftover borders in commercial fields to do some early selection on segregating populations.