Validating and promoting the ‘products’ generated by GCP research projects and facilitating their adoption lies at the heart of the GCP Delivery Strategy of which the development of Communities of Practice (CoP) out of project groups is a critical part.

The Rice in Asia CoP evolved from an SP5 BIOTEC-led project focusing on the long-term training of researchers in the Mekong region. The training involves line conversions, trait validations and field trials of rice introgression lines using molecular markers. The Cassava in Africa CoP on the other hand is an offshoot of an SP5 project led by the National Root Crops Research Institute in Nigeria. Its activities include population development, field evaluation of selected cassava clones, genotyping and marker-assisted selection for CMD resistance, and the sharing of experiences and information for building capacity. We are delighted to announce the launch of Beta websites for these two Communities of Practice, which will enhance the achievement of their core objectives.

The CoPs are intended as interactive forums for collaboration and exchange of ideas and germplasm between breeders and plant scientists from different regions and countries, who however have a mutual interest in molecular breeding. They also facilitate the sharing of data, methods, issues, problems and solutions for molecular breeding. They are expected to establish permanent communication structures for user-based support groups that will outlive their founding projects, allowing further acceleration of molecular breeding programmes and dissemination of improved germplasm. In addition, they provide a mechanism for networking with the wider community and resource providers.

Whilst the two websites are still under development, the Beta versions available already offer relevant materials and a range of resources which promise to be of interest to the GCP rice and cassava research communities. These resources include news snippets, information on past and forthcoming events, contact details and reports. It is expected that both websites will be further developed over the coming months.

To access the websites, and to view a selection of supplementary material and background information on the two CoPs, please visit GCP’s Communities and Networks homepage.

Following the dissemination of a vacancy announcement for the position of GCP Communications Assistant earlier this year, GCP is delighted to welcome Gillian Summers to the post. In addition to her fluent Spanish and a working knowledge of French and Portuguese, Gillian has a passion and proven adeptness for the English language, and holds several years of experience in international relations, translation and language tuition gained not only in her native UK, but also in Spain, Portugal and Mexico. Besides her language skills and international experience, Gillian brings to the role her artistic flair and keen eye for design issues, as well as a strong interest in environmental matters. Gillian, who took up the post at the end of May 2010, can be contacted on g.summers@cgiar.org

In welcoming Gillian to the GCP team, we also ask you to bid a fond farewell to the previous Communications Assistant, Kate Durbin. Kate has been an enthusiastic and valued member of the GCP Communications Unit for more than three years, and will be leaving the role at the end of July 2010 to take up new projects closer to home soil in Europe. Please join us in wishing Kate the very best for her future endeavours!

GCP is pleased to announce the availability of a new journal article describing the outcome of GCP’s Subprogramme 4 Project G4009.03: Development of data standards and community of practice enabling the capture of and access to GCP quality data sets.

The article, entitled Multifunctional crop trait ontology for breeders' data: field book, annotation, data discovery and semantic enrichment of the literature, is written by numerous SP4 scientists, amongst others. It examines the team’s establishment of a crop ontology (CO) database designed to provide controlled vocabulary sets for several economically important plant species. This facilitates data sharing within and between the agricultural crop databases maintained in gene banks of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, as well as enabling the retrieval of information.

To read this Open Access article, published in the prestigious academic journal AoB Plants, please visit our Research publications page.

Following the recent announcement on the launch of the Rice Challenge Initiative, which took place from 13–15 April 2010 in Montpellier, France, we are pleased to share a full set of materials produced at the workshop, including meeting agenda, list of participants, presentations, and photos.

To access the materials, please visit the workshop resources section of GCP’s Capacity-building corner.

Bye Jean Christophe...

Jean Christophe Glaszmann moved on from the GCP Management Team (MT) at the end of March, having diligently served as Subprogramme 1 (SP1) Leader since GCP’s inception. Over the six years he served as SP1 Leader, Jean Christophe (popularly known as JC) was on a joint appointment between GCP and CIRAD (Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement), where he now resumes work on a fulltime basis. GCP is deeply thankful to Jean Christophe for his outstanding contribution to the Programme. Jean Christophe brought not only his remarkable expertise on genetic diversity but also his vision as an experienced leader combined with an amiability appreciated by all. The MT is losing a colleague and a friend. But fortunately, Jean Christophe will continue to be involved in GCP’s work in various capacities in the months and years to come.

....and a few more changes

As GCP moves from the exploration and discovery that characterised Phase I to application and impact that shall underpin Phase II, the Management Team is evolving to adjust to the project structure of Phase II. The Team will now comprise of a Director and five Theme Leaders (TLs). The five TLs will oversee the following areas: Comparative and Applied Genomics (Rajeev Varshney), Integrated Breeding (Xavier Delannay), Crop Information Systems (Graham McLaren), Capacity Building (Carmen de Vicente) and Product Delivery (Larry Butler).

Research projects previously falling under Subprogramme 1 will be redistributed accordingly within the revised structure of the Programme, with care taken to ensure they continue without disruption or inconvenience. Principal Investigators (PIs) of SP1 projects will be informed individually on the new reporting lines for their project.

GCP is delighted to announce the approval and commencement of Phase II of the ‘Tropical Legumes I’ project following the submission of a research proposal to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other funders earlier this year. Phase I of the project, which is formally known as Improving tropical legume productivity for marginal environments in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, commenced in 2007 and ended on April 30th 2010. Phase II will span four years (2010 – 2014), having seamlessly commenced on May 1st, 2010 at the conclusion of Phase I.

The overall objective of TLI Phase II is to improve the productivity of groundnut, cowpea, common bean and chickpea for sub-Saharan Africa through the application of modern breeding approaches. Research activities in Phase I resulted in significant increases in the genomic tools for these legumes, a thorough knowledge of drought tolerance traits, as well as markers available for specific diseases. TLI Phase II will emphasise the ‘application’ of these outputs obtained during the first phase, using the genetic resources and genomic tools developed.

This second phase also has a strong capacity-building component that will build on Phase I efforts to improve human resources and local infrastructure. It will be implemented in close partnership with institutions in the target countries – EIAR in Ethiopia; University of Nairobi and KARI in Kenya; ECABREN, ART/DRD and LZARDI in Tanzania; INERA in Burkina Faso; IRAD in Cameroon;  INRAN in Niger; IITA in
Nigeria; ISRA in Senegal; SABRN and DART in Malawi; and AREX in Zimbabwe. The research activities will also be carried out in collaboration with our twin project Tropical Legumes II at ICRISAT, and also dovetail with GCP’s Integrated Breeding Platform initiative and the GCP Challenge Initiatives on chickpea and cowpea.

The total budget for TLI Phase II is US$12,118,970, of which the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is providing US$8,468,135, with additional support from GCP’s other key funders.

More details on the project's second phase are available in the Phase II project proposal narrative.

For more information on Phase I of the Tropical Legumes project, please visit the TLI website. Please note that the website will be updated in order to reflect the current realities of Phase II activities in due course.

Following our recent announcement on an Agropolis–CIRAD post-doctoral vacancy for a Plant Geneticist to work on a GCP sorghum project, the original deadline for applications has been extended to 7th June 2010.

More details on the vacancy and on how to apply.

Following a GCP Subprogramme 4/Subprogramme 2 workshop on Next generation sequencing (NGS) technology data analysis, held at ICRISAT in July 2009, a commentary on the workshop events and outcomes, entitled Challenges and Strategies for Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Data Analysis and written by GCP collaborator Vivek Thakur and Subprogramme 2 Leader Rajeev Varshney, has been published in the Journal of Computer Science & Systems Biology.

To discover the open access article, please visit our Research publications page.

GCP’s collaborators have joined forces once again, this time in their multiple contribution to the April 2010 issue of highly esteemed and influential academic plant sciences journal Current Opinion in Plant Biology.

Volume 13, Issue 2 of the journal is divided into two sub-sections on Genome studies and molecular genetics and Plant biotechnology, with both sections having been edited by GCP collaborator Douglas R Cook (University of California–Davis, USA) and GCP Subprogramme 2 Leader Rajeev K Varshney. Besides the editorial team, numerous GCP partners, including GCP project collaborators and GCP staff alike, have provided input on a range of key articles, with topics including domestication and plant genomes; accessing genetic diversity for crop improvement; the use of QTL for complex traits in multiple environments; modelling of abiotic stress tolerance in plants; and molecular breeding in developing countries, to name just a few.

View a full list of articles included in this issue of the journal.

To access any of the articles in this issue of Current Opinion in Plant Biology, please visit the Science Direct website.

To view a full list of publications resulting from GCP-funded research, please visit our Research publications page.

GCP research has received attention recently with three key articles resulting from GCP-funded research being published in highly steemed journals.

Accessing genetic diversity for crop improvement was published in the online version of highly esteemed journal Current Opinion in Plant Biology in February 2010, and has been recommended by the Science Direct website. The paper, authored by GCP Subprogramme 1 Leader Jean Christophe Glaszmann,  Subprogramme 2 Leader Rajeev Varshney, and scientists B Kilian (Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research, Germany) and HD Upadhyaya (ICRISAT), gets to the very heart of matters central to GCP’s mission as it examines approaches to broaden the use of ‘core reference sets’ so as to facilitate material sharing within the scientific community. The print version of the paper is currently in press, and expected to be published in due course. Details on this Journal article are available via our Research publications page.

Similarly, collaborators on GCP’s project G4007.13.03 – Application of molecular tools for controlled wild introgression into peanut germplasm in Senegal – a Subprogramme 5 Capacity-building project led by Ousmane Ndoye of l’Institut sénégalais de recherches agricoles (ISRA),  have seen the results of their work published in two separate journals:

• Faye I, Foncéka D, Rami J-F, Tossim H-A, Sall MN, Diop AT and Ndoye O (2010). Inheritance of fresh seed dormancy in Spanish-type peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.): bias introduced by inadvertent selfed flowers as revealed by microsatellite markers control. African Journal of Biotechnology 9 (13):1905–1910. PDF
• Foncéka D, Hodo-Abalo T, Rivallan R, Faye I, Ndoye Sall M, Ndoye O, Fávero AP, Bertioli DJ, Glaszmann JC, Courtois B and Rami J-F (2009). Genetic mapping of wild introgressions into cultivated peanut: a way toward enlarging the genetic basis of a recent allotetraploid. BMC Plant Biology 2009, 9:103. DOI:10.1186/1471-2229-9-103. PDF

To view a full list of GCP publications, please visit our Research publications. For media attention and related publications, please visit our Public awareness webpage.

The launch meeting of the Rice Challenge Initiative (CI) Improving drought tolerance in rice in Africa was held from 13–15 April 2010 at Agropolis–CIRAD in Montpellier, France. All collaborators, including AfricaRice and the national rice breeding programmes of Mali, Burkina Faso and Nigeria, were represented at the meeting, and detailed discussions were held on the activities and logistics of the project which is due commence with the preliminary evaluation of F₃ breeding populations by all partners in June 2010.

In order to increase the chance of successful, precise drought phenotyping, one of these four populations will be selected and phenotyped by all partners in the first round of marker-assisted recurrent selection. The pace of population development will increase as skills and capacity develop. In parallel work will start on characterisation of the target population of environments – the rainfed lowland ecosystems of Sudanian and Guinea Savannah in West Africa.  Work will also start on the identification of traits of interest for targeted environments using novel phenotyping methodologies.

The launch meeting was preceded by a preparatory Rice CI meeting hosted by AfricaRice (formerly known as ‘WARDA’) in June 2009. The Rice CI is the second of GCP’s seven Challenge Initiatives to have been officially launched, following the kick-off meetings for the Wheat CI, held in India and China in February 2010. Launch meetings for the GCP’s Sorghum, Comparative Genomics and Cassava CIs are scheduled to take place in the course of 2010, with details available on our Events calendar.

Full materials from the Rice CI Launch meeting, including a list of participants, agenda and presentations, will be made available in due course.

GCP’s Headquarters has strengthened its capacity in recent months through the arrival of two new staff members.

Fred Okono, of Kenyan nationality, came on board in early December 2009 as a Consultant for the recently renamed ‘Integrated Breeding Platform’ project (formerly 'Molecular Breeding Platform'). Fred has a background in capacity development, organisational design & development, and journalism. He has previously worked in various capacities in education and training, the non-governmental sector, and on various consultancies. At GCP, Fred has been working with other team members on the Integrated Breeding Platform, the GCP Workflow Management System and Communication.

Mae Christine Maghirang also joined the team as a Consultant in December and works closely with GCP’s Projects Office, providing analytical and operational support on a variety of accounting and finance operations. She serves at GCP on a half-time basis,  combining it with Programme Administrator duties at our host centre – Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo (CIMMYT). Mae Christine previously worked at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in her native Philippines for five years, gaining valuable expertise and experience in establishing accounting functions, systems and best practices and in project monitoring and reporting.

Please join us in welcoming Fred and Mae Christine to the team!

For those who are yet to explore, or who are looking to rediscover, the Interactive Resource Centre and Helpdesk – a collaborative project from GCP and Cornell University’s Institute for Genomic Diversity (IGD) – we highly encourage you to do so via the user-friendly social media tool that is Facebook (a free social networking site that includes groups of similarly-minded people), with a section having been dedicated entirely to the centre.

With 131 group members to date (as of 21st April 2010), the online space is intended to complement the centre & helpdesk, acting as a forum for international scientists working on molecular marker-assisted plant breeding and genetic diversity assessment. The content of the site is open to all.

The launch of the centre & helpdesk on Facebook was first unveiled to the GCP community during a poster session at the 2009 Annual Research Meeting, with this particular poster – penned and presented by the project’s Principal Investigator Theresa Fulton – having won the prize for best poster under Theme 4, Support services and enabling delivery.

To visit the Interactive Resource Centre and Helpdesk, please visit the GCP Helpdesks page.

Additional tools, resources and services are available in the GCP’s Capacity-building corner.

Platforms generally don’t move, but this one is decidedly different from the start.

During the launch workshop of GCP’s Molecular Breeding Platform, which took place in February 2010 in Hyderabad, India, one key issue raised by the meeting’s participants was the need to craft a new name for the project, and discontinue the project’s working title, which has thus far been ‘Molecular Breeding Platform’. GCP is pleased to announce the new name for this key project as the ‘Integrated Breeding Platform’ (or ‘IBP’).

The new name aims to more accurately present the all-encompassing nature of the project, contrary to the image conveyed by its former name: the IBP is not exclusively about molecular breeding.

The process behind the re-naming was, in traditional GCP style, a truly collaborative and consultative one, starting with participants at the February meeting above: they fronted several alternatives. From these suggestions, and after much (highly animated!) discussion, the GCP Management Team (MT) then narrowed down to three possible names, which were then tabled to the Platform’s User Committee (UC) and the Scientific and Management Committee (SiMAC). The three alternatives put to the vote were:

• Option 1: Innovative Breeding Platform
• Option 2: Integrated Breeding Platform
• Option 3: Global Breeding Platform

More details on the some of the perspectives and thinking behind the name change are in the Public Awareness Strategy (PPT from the February workshop) and the subsequent group discussions.

The response rate from the UC and SiMAC was extremely good! Once votes had been cast and results tallied, Option 2, the Integrated Breeding Platform, emerged as the definitive winner. The new name is effective yesterday, 13th April 2010. As such, instances of the former name and its derivative acronym (MBP) in the GCP website and other communications will be replaced with the new name.

GCP sincerely thanks all the IBP collaborators for their extremely valuable input in this preliminary step in the project’s branding, the first of several goals in the project’s public awareness strategy.

Read more on project at the Integrated Breeding Platform website

GCP partner Agropolis–CIRAD has a post-doctoral vacancy for a Plant Geneticist with a background in marker-assisted breeding and an interest in the international and finalised aspects of research for development. The selected candidate will be involved in a GCP sorghum marker-assisted breeding project and based in Mali. He/she will work on definition and follow-up of phenotyping experiments as well as methodological developments for data analysis.

Position description
Sorghum breeding in the Sahelian zone, particularly in Mali, aims at improving productivity and response to intensification while maintaining adaptation and grain quality characteristics of local varieties. Recent tools from molecular genetics and genotyping technologies enable innovative breeding strategies that allow the exploration of more allelic combinations than pedigree breeding schemes classically used in major crops.

The post-doctoral fellow will contribute to a GCP-funded project in which partners include the Institut d'Economie Rurale (Mali), Agropolis–CIRAD (Montpellier, France) and Syngenta Seeds (Toulouse, France). This Subprogramme 3 project, entitled Improving sorghum productivity in semi-arid environments of Mali through integrated MARS, implements recent methodologies for marker-assisted recurrent selection with two bi-parental populations currently being developed in Mali. The post-doctoral fellow will participate in the coordination of a first year of phenotyping, to be conducted in 2010 in Mali, and will later be involved in QTL data analysis and methodological development for MARS in conjunction with Syngenta and development teams of the GCP’s Molecular Breeding Platform.

Eligibility requirements:

• PhD in plant genetics and breeding
• Experience in marker-assisted breeding theory and good skills in data analysis and biostatistics/informatics
• Motivation for field work in a tropical area
• Communicative skills in both French and English

Location: Bamako, Mali and Montpellier, France

New deadline for applications*: 7th June 2010 

Start date of contract: As soon as possible

Type of contract: CDD POST DOCT, 18 months
Job reference: 1646

For more details on the vacancy and on how to apply are available on the Agropolis–CIRAD website in English and in French

*Please note that the above deadline supersedes the original application deadline of 21st April 2010.

Following the recent launch of the Integrated Breeding Platform (formerly known as the Molecular Breeding Platform), a major GCP initiative intended as an online one-stop shop providing solutions and innovations in plant breeding for developing countries through analytical tools, services and project design, GCP is pleased to announce the arrival of two key members to the project team, as the vacancies for Senior Scientist–MBP Manager and Scientist–Informatics Coordinator have now been filled.

Taking up the position of MBP Manager, effective mid-April 2010, is Diego Gonzalez De Leon. Diego, of Mexican nationality, holds a PhD in Plant Genetics and Biosystematics from the University of Reading, UK and a BSc in Biology (with First Class Honors) from the University of London, UK. He also comes armed with a wealth of professional experience under his belt, encompassing genetic research on several major and minor crops, including maize, wheat, bananas, sugarcane, sorghum and Capsicum peppers, and he has significant expertise in laboratory design.

Before joining GCP Diego was a Visiting Professor in the Virus-Plant Interactions Laboratory at Mexican institute Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados (CINVESTAV). Prior to this, he was Head of the Molecular Genetics Laboratory at CIMMYT for five years, and has also held positions as Associate Head of the AGETROP laboratory at Agropolis–CIRAD, France, and as Associate Scientist for CIMMYT’s maize programme (based at the Maize RFLP Laboratory at the University of Missouri, Columbia, USA), amongst others, and has also worked as a scientific consultant for numerous institutes. Diego has been a member of the National Researchers System for the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT), Mexico, since the beginning of 2009, and is proficient in Spanish, English and French. Full details on the position of MBP Manager were provided in the original vacancy announcement.

Stepping into the role of Informatics Coordinator is Arllet Portugal. In her new position at GCP, Arllet will coordinate all aspects of data and information management for the Platform. Further details on the role itself are available in the original vacancy announcement.

Prior to taking on this role, Arllet was based at GCP’s host centre Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo (CIMMYT), where she worked for over a year as a Crop Informatics Specialist, coordinating the global integration of all historical pedigree and phenotype data from CIMMYT wheat breeding research projects into a single database and developing a public, open source International Crop Information System (ICIS), a database system for managing biological data of crops. Before landing in Mexico, Arllet worked at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in her home country of the Philippines for four years, where her work on ICIS began, and saw her leading a team of eight programmers, in addition to coordinating training and tutorials about the database both in IRRI and in public and private sector institutes. Arllet holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of the Philippines, Los Banos, and completed a two-year post-graduate research programme focusing on an Earthquake Disaster Prevention System at Yamaguchi University in Japan.

Geographic Information System (GIS) senior analyst Ernesto Giron of Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT), a key contributor to the work carried out by CIAT for GCP Subprogramme (SP) 3 project G4008.34: Environmental assessment for phenotyping network, has been awarded fourth prize in a competition for geodevelopers.

The competition, known as the ‘ESRI 2010 Mashup Challenge’, and launched by the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), demanded that competitors build a ‘mashup’ using ESRI's online content and shoot a video describing the application. The mashup had to be deployed as a web application and needed to combine data from more than one source, including ArcGIS Online content, into a single web application.

Ernesto was the proud recipient of fourth prize and an award of $2,500 for his development of a web-based GIS research tool for Drought Timing for Agronomic Screening, an international, interactive soil map that indicates soil type and quality and climate patterns in a specified area and its agricultural capabilities with respect to potential drought conditions. The map and application was commissioned and funded by the above-named SP3 project, but has also spawned similar tools for GCP Subprogramme 5 projects G4006.13: Targeting and impact analysis of Generation Challenge Programme.

More details on the ESRI competition and outcomes are available here.

Please join us in congratulating Ernesto and his team members for this great achievement!

Besides the recent success in the ESRI competition, news of the map has also reached the eyes and ears of many, with the tool having featured in a speech at the WHERE 2.0 conference in San Jose, California, USA – a cutting-edge event in the field of geographic information systems and science. More (in Spanish).

For Executive Summaries of the above-named GCP research projects, please see our Programme publications page.