Maxwell Asante
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“The fellowship is a great opportunity for scientists from developing countries to be equipped with modern tools and techniques that will help them to breed better crops. It helps awardees to learn the work culture at GCP consortium institutions and meet scientists and students who could become future collaborators.”
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Profile
Expertise: Rice breeding for upland and rainfed lowland ecosystems using Conventional methods and Marker-assisted selection.
Home Institution: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research-Crops Research Institute, Ghana
Position: Research Scientist
Host Institution: Cornell University, USA
Project Title: Quality rices for west africa: mapping of aroma gene in nerica rice
Major achievements related to the fellowship:
- I was introduced to bioinformatics and molecular mapping.
- I can now apply marker-assisted selection to make my breeding work more efficient.
- I found that the 8bp deletion and three SNPS on chromosome 8 which is responsible for aroma in Basmati and Jasmine-styled rices is either causally responsible for aroma in Nerica 1 or in perfect linkage disequilibrium with the causal mutation.
- Nerica 1 inherited aroma from an unknown aromatic genotype containing the 8bp deletion in BAD2; this mutation was not present in either of the documented parents i.e. WAB56-104 and CG14.
- The fellowship also provided data on the association between the 8bp deletion and the phenotype of 66 aromatic and non-aromatic rice accessions from Ghana.
- A paper written from the fellowship results has been published in the online version of Molecular Breeding. More