January 1, 2022
The focus of this project is on resilience of the Hub Food Innovation Centers as convergence points for product innovation and drivers of economic and nutritional impacts for Niger and Senegal. Hub Food Innovation Centers are being strengthened to better engage with entrepreneurs, improve their effectiveness as product development centers, and bolster their sustainability.
January 2, 2022
This project employs tools of biotechnology, breeding, and agronomy to unleash the potential of the sorghum crop for needy farmers. The project team is developing a core-set of sorghum germplasm population to characterize the inherent variability through genotyping by sequencing. The team is also phenotyping valuable traits under target environments and treating data with appropriate bioinformatics and statistical procedures to identify useful allelic variations for drought and Striga resistance.
January 3, 2022
This project expands the team’s sorghum crop improvement efforts through targeted research and technology transfer to promote and enhance sorghum production and nutritional value. Researchers have already identified allelic variation in genes that influence grain and forage quality; specifically, grain protein digestibility, modified starches that produce new functional food and nutritional attributes, and improved forage quality.
January 4, 2022
New sorghum hybrids under development combine high protein digestibility (HPD) mutation with waxy and heterowaxy (WX/HX) starch traits in hard endosperm show a lot of promise for various food applications due to superior functionality and improved protein nutritional quality. This project aims to advance the use of these new sorghums for food and nutrition security in Ethiopia.
January 5, 2022
The Sorghum Adaptation in West Africa with a Genomics-Enabled Breeding Network (SAWAGEN) is a unique network of national researchers, international collaborators and farmer organizations aimed at leveraging capacity to develop and deliver demand-driven improved varieties to farmers. It is built on four separate platforms – local adaptation breeding, genetic mapping research, physiological mapping research, and broad adaptation breeding – and links researchers across those platforms in a hypothesis-driven, goal-oriented research approach. The SAWAGEN spans Senegal, Burkina Faso, Togo and Niger and reinforces existing regional breeding network initiatives to further accelerate interdisciplinary solutions to key crop improvement challenges across the Sahel.
January 6, 2022
Drought, disease, and insect pressure are key constraints for pearl millet production in West Africa. There is a recognized need for rapid advancement in the development of varieties addressing these constraints while taking into consideration farmer’s practices and market acceptability. This project is accelerating the development of a combination of pearl millet innovations to support sustainable productivity enhancement of the crop and ultimately increased food security and income generation for vulnerable populations in the West Africa.
January 7, 2022
Research collaboration between Texas A&M, INRAN, and ISRA extended to include researchers at nearby Universities in Niger and Senegal will result in the identification or creation of disease-resistant, locally adapted, sorghum cultivars that maintain properties preferred by farmers and consumers alike. Target diseases are anthracnose and long smut in Niger and anthracnose and grain mold in Senegal.
January 8, 2022
The focus of this project is on resilience of the Hub Food Innovation Centers as convergence points for product innovation and drivers of economic and nutritional impacts for Niger and Senegal. Hub Food Innovation Centers are being strengthened to better engage with entrepreneurs, improve their effectiveness as product development centers, and bolster their sustainability.
January 9, 2022
Globally, there is great interest in applying new genomic technologies to accelerate genetic gains in developing country breeding programs. However, these methods have not been adopted in developing country level National Agricultural Research Institutes (NARI) due a mismatch between available genomic selection approaches and the existing operations of NARI breeding programs.