Survey on African orphan crops

Danny posted the following recently on the “Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition” Yahoo Group. I couldn’t find it anywhere else online, so he may have got it by email, I’m not sure. He did ask for it to be more widely disseminated, so here goes. We have mentioned the African Orphan Crop Consortium here before, mainly, if memory serves, to question whether sequencing the genome of said crops was necessarily the best way to spend $40 million. But then we would, wouldn’t we.

“The African Orphan Crop (AOC) consortium had a successful launch at the Clinton Global Initiative in September and the Beijing Genomic Institute has already started work on sequencing winter-thorn acacia (Faidherbia albida). ((Faidherbia albida is still included in the survey to gather more information on the crop.)) After gathering wonderful feedback from our meeting this summer, we are now conducting a survey to guide the next steps of the project. Via the survey, you are invited to contribute your knowledge and opinions to inform the selection process for the first 20-25 crops that the consortium will genetically sequence. We deeply appreciate your willingness to share insights with this project and would encourage you to forward the survey to others in your network who might like to participate.

The results of this survey will be used by the consortium to inform a process for prioritizing which crops will be initially selected for genetic sequencing, assembly, and annotation by the consortium. As discussed this summer, once this information is developed, it will be placed into the public domain, and plant breeding programs will be established to support development of these crops including the training of 750 plant scientists in Africa. Ultimately, we would like to sequence all of the appropriate crops on this list, and we believe that the momentum generated by the first set of sequenced crops will attract additional interest and funding.