Her Majesty visits NIAB and hears about cowpea transformation
Written by Alison Bentley.
As part of her visit to Cambridge for a day of engagements on 9th July 2019, Her Majesty visited the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) where Her Majesty viewed an exhibition celebrating 100 years of crop research and met Dr Alison Bentley to hear about her ALBORADA Research Fund project.
The project which seeks to establish tissue culture and genetic transformation for scalable cowpea improvement in sub-Saharan Africa, was a partnership between Dr Bentley, NIAB, Cambridge and Dr John Eleblu, from the West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement (WACCI) at the University of Ghana, Ghana. We are grateful to have received project funding and have subsequently received further Cambridge-Africa funding to continue the work (“Upscaling cowpea improvement for food security in Ghana”).
At NIAB we have now developed a pipeline for implementing reliable and reproducible tissue culture in African cowpea accessions (an accession being a distinct, uniquely identifiable sample of seeds representing a cultivar, breeding line or a population). This allows for the production of whole cowpea plants from cotyledonary (embryonic seed leaf) nodes from 4- day-old germinated seeds. Based on a rapid screen of 14 cowpea accessions (selected by WACCI to represent the diversity of material currently grown by farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa) we have identified the accession high levels of germination, efficiency of regeneration in tissue culture and transformation potential (based on numbers of shoots generated per explant). We will transfer the established protocol to the newly commissioned tissue culture laboratory at WACCI. We will deliver a workshop to train staff and early career researchers on the use of the developed protocols and discuss the potential uses of the system for supporting cowpea research in Ghana.