Editeur
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Date de parution
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00:00:00
EAN/ISBN
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Thématique
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Autres - Autres
Adhérent
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Éditions Quae
Présentation de l'éditeur
The domestication of wild yams is still common practice in West Africa.
It also offers one of the few remaining opportunities to understand how
farmers use their empirical knowledge to tap the genetic resources
of wild plants and create products suitable for agriculture.Yam agronomists and breeders have, until recently, focused little
attention on this process of organizing and generating agrobiodiversity.
This book aims to fill the gap by pooling existing knowledge on the
subject. This original field offers a wealth of prospects for scientific
progress at a time when scientists are becoming increasingly aware
of the fact that local farmers' knowledge and practices relating to genetic
resource management substantially enhances the potential for technical
progress and adaptation to environmental change.The focus is deliberately only on domestication leading to Dioscorea
rotundata yams, the type most widely cultivated in West Africa. Several
chapters are devoted to the biodiversity of Dioscorea rotundata yams
and the wild forms from which they derive.The authors conclude by putting forward hypotheses to explain
the phenotype transformations induced by domestication practices
and their maintenance by vegetative propagation. Further research,
especially by geneticists, is needed to confirm these hypotheses.
Some are already being assessed, using the most advanced molecular
marker analysis techniques, by joint teams of scientists from developed
and developing countries.
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