From 18-21 March 2010 plant genetic researchers from around the globe will gather for the 52nd Maize Genetics Conference, to be held in Riva del Garda, Italy. Topics will include Biochemical genetics, bioinformatics & computational biology, functional genomics and quantitative genetics & breeding, amongst others. The event, which will include talks from a number of internationally renowned researchers, will prompt discussions on the most current scientific and technical advances in maize genetics, as well as providing ample networking opportunities amongst potential collaborators. Formal plenary sessions will be complemented by oral and poster presentations.

Deadline for pre-meeting registration (for reduced fees, and highly recommended): 29th January 2010; registration after this date will incur higher fees, and will be subject to availability of places.

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October and November 2010 saw twin workshops on Management of Agricultural Research Stations successfully undertaken in Niger and Ghana. Both events were for research station managers, whose pivotal role is fundamental in ensuring that research investments – in terms of time, money and resources – are well utilised.

The francophone workshop in Niger, hosted by ICRISAT–Niamey, took place from 4–20 October, with 22 participants from five French-speaking African countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Senegal. The ICRISAT newsletter Happenings has further details.

The Ghana workshop focused on anglophone African countries, with 28 participants from Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Tanzania, and took place from 8–24 November. It was hosted by the Crop Research Institute, Kumasi. The event was covered by the Ghana news Agency (GNA), and the story was carried by several media, such as BusinessGhana.

Training centred on research station management and planning, communication skills, irrigation, field equipment, management of record-keeping, maintenance systems, research plots and field operations. The course organisers urged participants to take full advantage of the training, and to take home the knowledge they gathered, in order to improve research in their home countries.

GCP will soon be publishing a book entitled ‘Drought phenotyping in crops: from theory to practice’. This book takes a deep dive into the complex world of drought phenotyping in crops. Featuring chapter contributions from more than 80 distinguished scientists, it is edited by Philippe Monneveux (formerly GCP Subprogramme Leader) and Jean-Marcel Ribaut (GCP Director).

The book will be published under the Creative Commons licence, thereby ensuring the widest possible dissemination.

More details – including chapter titles, authors and a preface – are in the book preview.

The 3rd GCP-funded cassava community of practice (CoP) annual workshop took place from July 19–22, in Accra, Ghana, forming part of a series of workshops and meetings on cassava.

• Presentations and related materials
• Feature story on the meeting

Related meetings also held in Accra were: the Cassava data management workshop, which ran concurrently with the CoP workshop, from 19–21 July, and the launch meeting of the cassava Research Initiative (RI) (Improving cassava yield in Africa's drought-prone environments) from 23–24 July 2010.

Application deadline: December 2nd, 2010

A course, entitled ‘Introduction to mixed model QTL mapping using GenStat’ has been organised by the Department of Genetics, Escola Superior de Agricultura “Luiz de Quieroz” (ESALQ) / Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP), Wageningen University (WUR) & GCP’s IBP, and will be taking place from 13–15 December, 2010, at the Department of Genetics, ESALQ/USP, Piracicaba, Brazil.

IMPORTANT: classes will be in English, without translation.

The course will include both theory lectures and practical sessions that will allow attendants to become familiar with the details of the actions required to perform a QTL analysis in GenStat using Windows’ dialogues and in R using source code. The practicals will also serve to learn how to interpret QTL mixed model analysis output.

By the end of the course participants should be able to:

• Perform a QTL analysis for a wide array of single populations, for single and multiple environments, and single and multiple traits
• Use various inference procedures for assessing QTL evidence
• Report QTL locations and effects

Instructors

• Fred van Eeuwijk, Professor in Applied Statistics
• Marcos Malosetti, Assistant Professor in Applied Statistics
• Martin Boer, Senior Scientist Quantitative Genetics

Eligibility

Postgraduate students and professionals interested in a flexible QTL mapping approach, applicable in standard situations (SIM, CIM) as well as more specialized situations (multi-environment QTL mapping, QTLxE, multi-trait QTL mapping, association mapping, in- and outbreeders). It is recommended that course participants have some familiarity with mixed models and quantitative genetics. Researchers participating in activity 3.2.4 of GCP’s Integrated Breeding Platform initiative are particularly invited to attend this course.

Expenses

The course fees are BRL 150.00 (about USD 90) for students (ID required), BRL 150.00 for members of the GCP-IBP, and BRL 250 (about USD 150) for professionals.

Contact

For further details, contact Prof. Dr. Antonio Augusto Franco Garcia aafgarci@esalq.usp.br

Registration and notification

There will be previous selection of applications, with a maximum number of 40 participants. Students and researchers belonging to the Integrated Breeding Platform of the Generation Challenge Programme (GCP-IBP) and/or to the graduate programme in Genetics and Plant Breeding (ESALQ/USP) will receive preferential treatment. For registration, send an email (in English) to A Augusto F Garcia (aafgarci@esalq.usp.br) naming your institute and stating the reasons why you want to take the course.

On December 4th applicants will be notified of the final decision and will receive instructions about how to pay the fee.

For more information about this course, please visit the course information page at the Department of Genetics (ESALQ/USP).

We are pleased to inform our readers of a choice selection of training events linked to our tropical legumes project, taking place at ICRISAT in the past and coming months.

Firstly, the training course, in progress since October 25, 2010, is part of a capacity building exercise of the GCP project Tropical Legumes I (TLI) – Phase II. It is entitled 'Improving chickpea productivity for marginal environments in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa', and participants are being exposed to:

• Ongoing activities on chickpea breeding, physiology and entomology
• Molecular markers and molecular breeding activities for chickpea improvement

The next training event was the 2nd National Workshop on ‘Marker-assisted selection for crop improvement’ at ICRISAT from October 27–29, 2010. Course participants also had an opportunity to interact with plant breeders, molecular biologists, pathologists, entomologists, physiologists, biometricians and bioinformatics specialists. The training course prepared participants to successfully apply the knowledge gained at ICRISAT for chickpea improvement in their institutes.

For detailed coverage of these two events, please see the ICRISAT Newsletter, Happenings.

The third and final training course is ‘Application of molecular markers for crop improvement’ taking place from November 8–19, 2010. This course will include training in experimental design and analysis of genomics data for breeding applications.

GCP’s Molecular Marker Toolkit has been documented in an article in leading specialist journal, 'Molecular Breeding'. The article, entitled “The GCP molecular marker toolkit, an instrument for use in breeding food security crops”, is authored by Veerle Van Damme, Humberto Gomez Paniagua and Carmen de Vicente, the GCP scientists who developed the toolkit. Both the abstract and full paper are open access and are therefore publicly available online.

The GCP Molecular Marker Toolkit is a free online tool that aims to promote the adoption of molecular approaches in breeding activities by allowing rapid access to currently available and validated molecular markers. It aims to close the knowledge gap between developing- and developed-countries, and marks an important step towards supporting the adoption of modern agricultural technologies for the benefit of the poor in developing countries.

Access the Toolkit

Autumn winds have blown in a few changes at GCP HQ. Firstly, we would like to bid a friendly goodbye to former Programme Assistant, Laura Ruiz, who took leave of GCP at the end of October 2010, after just over three years in the position. Laura was a cheerful and enthusiastic member of the team at GCP, and is now pursuing a new role in the Training department at CIMMYT. We wish you all the best in your new challenge, Laura!

We are also happy to welcome two new faces into the GCP family: Gema Gonzalez, who will provide administrative support, and Sandra Morales, Administrative Coordinator, who will be assisting IBP staff. Welcome, Gema and Sandra!

In the opening speech of the 3rd International Conference on Plant Molecular Breeding (ICPMB), the Director General of the Institute of Crop Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), Jianmin Wan, pointedly mentioned the growing problem of food security.

Similarly, molecular breeding (MB) has been growing at par with the problem, as the 3rd ICPMB saw the biggest meeting to date, with over 700 participants at its venue, the Beijing International Convention Center, from 5–9 September 2010.

The sheer magnitude of this meeting illustrates how much the original idea has evolved – from being an event for exploring opportunities for using MB in crop improvement – into a full-scale movement, of which GCP is a major player, and through which we can see our own vision becoming a reality.

GCP was pleased to be a major sponsor of the conference, and we were also instrumental in organising the event. GCP Director Jean-Marcel Ribaut took part in preparing the programme and the opening speeches plus our Theme Leaders, Xavier Delannay, Graham McLaren and Rajeev Varshney, were prominent in both the plenary and concurrent sessions.

Although a number of sessions presented the latest findings in molecular biology, genomics and genetic diversity, whose applications will be available in the coming years, the real character of the conference was most definitely ‘molecular breeding as a tool for crop improvement’, rather than MB as a topic for research only. This indication of progress was greeted with great enthusiasm by the whole assembly.

The conference was a veritable marketplace of academics (including several GCP-sponsored participants), breeders and representatives from industry, whose rich mix made the event a resounding success. Breeders were able to see what tools and technology are coming in the pipeline and scientists could see what breeders are working on. Representation from industry was also positive, with the private sector proving to be open about research and about tools being used.

This very sharing of ideas between sectors and across disciplines was also at the heart of GCP’s own aim for the conference: to exchange knowledge, technology and experiences – the objective of which is to ultimately provide more practical access to services. GCP is actively working in this field with the creation of the Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP) which will be a public web-based one-stop shop for information, analytical tools and related services to design and efficiently conduct molecular-assisted breeding experiments. It also offers facilities to access these tools and services. Bioinformatics will be the way forward in this field, and was also extensively covered at the conference.

The conference being hosted in the centralised city of Beijing also had a positive influence on the success of the event, as there was greater ease of access to the venue. Participants were attended to by the Chinese host institutions who were the principal organisers of the event. China is in fact the current powerhouse in the MB movement, and the leaders in sequencing and genomics; this was evident with the great turnout from the Chinese academic community with approximately 400 post-docs attending the event. China truly sees the potential of MB and they are moving forward in the field in terms of both technology and research and aided by such international events as the ICPMB.

China’s prominent position in the world of MB also influenced the decision to keep the next ICPMB in China, though it is possible that the conferences after 2013 will be hosted in a different country.

GCP’s main opinion is that MB has come an incredibly long way since the start of GCP and the start of the conferences, a sentiment echoed by the conference’s organisers and attendees. Now there is a feeling that there is no turning back: the scientific community is no longer asking whether MB will be helpful, now the pertinent question is “how can we optimise the tools”?

Indeed, the new technologies which have arisen as a direct result of the MB movement are already proving to be crucial in solving the critical food security issue – the more publicly, the better, as through the ICPMB.

In line with the ongoing development and growth of the GCP initiative, the Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP), GCP is pleased to announce the arrival of the Breeding Services Manager to the IBP team.

Taking up this key role is Chunlin He, who will manage the marker services and trait and metabolite services provided by GCP, as an integral part of IBP. Further details about this role can be found in the original vacancy announcement.

Chunlin, originally from China, has an impressive background in molecular genetics and plant breeding, whose know-how and experience will be of great benefit to the role of Breeding Services Manager and the IBP as a whole.

Before taking up this position with GCP, Chunlin held a variety of positions related to research and breeding at private companies and universities throughout USA, Canada and China, where his areas of expertise covered: the development of SSRs and SNPs in molecular breeding; proficiency in other breeding technologies; molecular biology and plant pathology skills; application of analytical software; trait development; trained handling of GMO materials and management of diverse research projects. Chunlin holds a Ph.D in Plant Genetics & Breeding from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, a Master of Science in Statistical/Quantitative Genetics from Nanjing Agricultural University, China, and a Bachelor of Science in Agronomy from Hunan Agricultural University, China. In addition, Chunlin is a much-published author, with works in several peer-reviewed journals, and he is the recipient of a multitude of awards and research grants spanning his career.