To improve the productivity of cassava — a rough and ready root crop that has long been the foundation of food security in Africa — and plant breeding in sub-Saharan Africa, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Department for International Development of the United Kingdom have awarded Cornell $25.2 million to host a five-year research project.
Cornell will coordinate work with the National Crops Resources Research Institute in Uganda, National Root Crops Research Institute in Nigeria, International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria, Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research on the Cornell campus, and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
The cassava team at Cornell also includes scientific leader Jean-Luc Jannink, research geneticist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and adjunct professor of plant breeding and genetics, and Tim Setter, chair of the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences. The partners will share cassava data, expertise and information on a website http://www.cassavabase.org, which was developed by Lukas Mueller of BTI.
See the full article in the Cornell Chronicle.