Biotechnology Success Stories by the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) System

The CGIAR (Consultative Groups for International Agricultural Research, www.cgiar.org) deploys agricultural biotechnology innovations to improve crops’ and livestock’s productivity and quality in Africa. CGIAR centers have played a pivotal role in kick-starting agbiotech among NARS partners in Africa through various contributions towards building human resource and infrastructure as well as providing access to genomic resources of major African crops and developing biotech varieties and associated biosafety regulatory systems. Genomic resources such as molecular markers, genetic linkage maps, transcriptome, annotated genome sequences, which are extremely valuable for molecular breeding were limited or non-existent for a large number of African staple crops until recently. Modern breeding schemes aimed at accelerating genetic gain, such as genome selection (GS), marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS), and marker-assisted back-crossing (MABC) are underway for many African crops. In an effort to deploy molecular breeding by NARS, genotyping services and Web-based Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP, https://www.integratedbreeding.net/) providing crop information and analytical tools to help design and conduct marker-assisted breeding experiments have been developed. With regard to plant protection, CGIAR centers have played a significant role in the development and application of molecular tools for the characterization, detection and diagnosis of disease causing agents through development of simple and accurate tools and procedures. Harnessing advances in biotechnology tools and increasing availability of genomes of pathogens and pests helped CGIAR centers and partners to address the complexity of pathogen diversity, germplasm evaluation, and monitoring of mycotoxins in food and feed samples as well as efficient assays for simultaneous detection of multiple pathogens. Genetic engineering has been applied to improvement of priority traits where conventional non-GM approaches have little promise. Several biotech products are now in the pipeline with anticipated release time in the coming few years. Examples include transgenic banana plants that have exhibited strong resistance to banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW), Nematode resistant plantain, virus and weevil resistant sweetpotato, late blight resistant potato, and cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) resistant cassava. Application of additional biotechnological tools such as doubled haploid technologies, next-generation sequencing based applications, and genome editing technologies are poised to further accelerate the impact of biotechnology in enhancing agricultural productivity in Africa.