SA participates in EU research to enhance the use of grain legumes crops

10 August 2006

The EU faces the challenge of providing high quality protein for both animal and human consumption and accordingly has supported the development of an integrated approach to the development of genetic and genomic tools for the analysis and improvement of grain legumes.

This investment has a potentially wider reach in Targeted Third Countries, where grain legumes are an important component of the human diet, and an integral part of low input agricultural systems, providing food, income and sustaining the productivity of other crops.

The Grain Legumes Integrated Project (GLIP) is mobilising and integrating scientific research on grain legumes by addressing the objectives of; i) identifying optimal parameters for legumes in feed quality and safety, while using legumes to develop healthy and sustainable agriculture; ii) investigating variation in grain legume seed composition and the factors affecting it; iii) developing new genetic, genomic, post-genomic and bioinformatic tools to improve and sustain grain legume seed production and quality.

To these ends the project integrates a combination of approaches at an ambitious scale, including biochemistry, plant and crop physiology, agronomy, plant genomics and breeding, and animal nutritional studies. Particular emphasis is placed upon the use of state-of-the-art methodologies including genomics and bioinformatics, together with transcriptomics and metabolomics.

Many of these approaches and tools can be deployed to the benefit of agricultural systems in Targeted Third Countries. Accordingly we propose to extend this project by widening taxonomic reach of comparative and crop specific genomics and by addressing the genetics and genomics of constraints to productivity as a consequence of biotic and abiotic stress. These areas of activity map directly to the corresponding studies within the existing Integrated Project and provide new biological and intellectual resources to the existing programme of work.

South African's School of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of the Witwatersrand will contribute to the GLIP activities primarily related to the identification and characterization of key genetic regulators of abiotic stress adaptation in grain legumes.

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