UNDERGRADUATES DEVELOPING RESOURCES FOR LOST CROPS OF AFRICA

The resources dedicated to undergraduate laboratory courses are not insignificant. However, the majority of the time these courses are designed around repeating a task with a known outcome. The exceptions to this scenario are the Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs). However, one area that could benefit from an injection of resources is the characterization of orphan crops, particularly those from Africa. These species have not received much attention, either scientifically, or through funded resources, since they do not readily lend themselves to rapid commercial exploitation. However, they do provide a rich source of enquiry for laboratory courses that generate novel data and require the students to interpret new data, not simply decide if they got the ‘right’ answer. One example of such a course and collaboration is between Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST) and the University of Pretoria (UP) in South Africa ([1], [2], [3], [4]). This collaboration has focused on a potential food crop, Tylosema esculentum (marama bean), which is endemic to the Kalahari sands region of South West Africa. The laboratory course activities undertaken at CWRU have resulted in whole genome sequences of more than 60 individuals and a characterization of the diversity of the germplasm, funded by the laboratory support from the Biology Department. The US based course is supplemented by a field course with students travelling to Namibia to collect data and samples in collaboration with students and faculty from NUST and UP. The combination of these two courses provide an ongoing research collaboration that is capable of being sustained with a minimal of external funding, while still providing meaningful research and international experiences for the students. The African Orphan Crops Consortium has the goal of sequencing 100 orphan crops for possible domestication and/or improvement. With current sequencing technology the acquisition of genome and transcriptomic data is no longer the limiting, but the expertise for analyzing this data is now the roadblock. However, incorporating the informatics analyses as part of undergraduate research courses will provide important advances while also allowing the students to obtain bioinformatic skills. The work on a specific plant species will also globally connect the students and the researchers in Africa for the benefit of both parties and increase both the understanding and scientific output across continents.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  EDULEARN19 Proceedings

• Publication date

  2019-07-01

• Fields of study

  Agricultural and Food Sciences, Geography, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.21125/EDULEARN.2019.1708
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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• Involving American undergraduates in research and education collaborations with Africa.

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