Gathering the Desert
Gathering the Desert

Author: Gary Paul Nabhan

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2016-10-01

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0816535019

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Winner of the John Burroughs Association’s John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing and a Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association To the untrained eye, a desert is a wasteland that defies civilization; yet the desert has been home to native cultures for centuries and offers sustenance in its surprisingly wide range of plant life. Gary Paul Nabhan has combed the desert in search of plants forgotten by all but a handful of American Indians and Mexican Americans. In Gathering the Desert readers will discover that the bounty of the desert is much more than meets the eye—whether found in the luscious fruit of the stately organpipe cactus or in the lowly tepary bean. Nabhan has chosen a dozen of the more than 425 edible wild species found in the Sonoran Desert to demonstrate just how bountiful the land can be. From the red-hot chiltepines of Mexico to the palms of Palm Springs, each plant exemplifies a symbolic or ecological relationship which people of this region have had with plants through history. Each chapter focuses on a particular plant and is accompanied by an original drawing by artist Paul Mirocha. Word and picture together create a total impression of plants and people as the book traces the turn of seasons in the desert.

The Amaranth Genome
The Amaranth Genome

Author: Dinesh Adhikary

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 3030723658

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This book describes the development of genetic resources in amaranths, with a major focus on genomics, reverse, and forward genetics tools and strategies that have been developed for crop improvement. Amaranth is an ancient crop native to the New World. Interest in amaranths is being renewed, due to their adaptability, stress tolerance, and nutritional value. There are about 65 species in the genus, including Amaranthus caudatus L., A. cruentus L., and A. hypochondriacus L., which are primarily grown as protein-rich grains or pseudocereals. The genus also includes major noxious weeds (e.g., A. palmeri). The amaranths are within the Caryophyllales order and thus many species (e.g., A. tricolor) produce red (betacyanin) or yellow (betaxanthin) betalain pigments, which are chemically distinct from the anthocyanins responsible for red pigmentation in other plants. A. hypochondriacus, which shows disomic inheritance (2n = 32; n= 466 Mb), has been sequenced and annotated with 23,059 protein-coding genes. Additional members of the genus are now also been sequenced including weedy amaranths, other grain amaranths, and their putative progenitors.