African Orphan Crops Consortium: a Global Partnership to Address Food and Nutritional Requirements in Africa through Genomics Applications

Optimal nutrition is critical for human development and economic growth, but sub-Saharan Africa’s efforts to mitigate malnutrition, lags behind rest of the world. There are several indigenous or naturalized crops in Africa, which have potential to improve resilience of food systems and raise farmer’s income but need resources such as genomics technologies to make effective advancements.

The African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC, africanorphancrops.org), a public-private international partnership of 14 partners seeks to address this gap by undertaking intense genomics research on neglected 101 African trees and crops.

The selected crops were prioritized through online surveys and individual interactions with breeders, farmers, academicians, socialists, businesses and policymakers from Africa. These are being sequenced primarily using next generation sequencing (NGS) technology at BGI. The transcriptome sequencing will be carried out at Agricultural Research Council, South Africa using Illumina NGS and transcripts will be generated and annotated at iPlant. Re-sequencing will be carried out on 100 public accessions important to Africa. The re-sequencing will be performed by multiplexing on Ion Proton using P1 chip (Thermo Fisher Scientific) at ICRAF. The SNP discovery will be performed at the iPlant Collaborative, Tuscon, USA.

Until now AOCC has started working on whole genome sequencing of 24 species. Draft genomes are being finalized for four of them and draft genome is ready for Eleusine corocana (finger millet). Re-sequencing is at various stages for three species. RNA-sequencing will soon begin to aid genome annotation.  All data will be made publicly available through iPLant, GenBAnk and GigaScience.