Descriptions

Africa Plant Breeding Academy (AfPBA) CRISPR (an acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) Course builds on the goal of the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC) to end chronic hunger and malnutrition and to eradicate stunting in Africa. Having trained more than 150 crop improvement scientists representing 28 countries in use of genomics-assisted breeding approaches, the AOCC/AfPBA now opens the door to innovation in creating new sources of key traits for improved crop varieties through gene editing. The AfPBA CRISPR Program aims to train 80-100 PhD molecular biologists from national programs in Africa over the next 5 years through an intensive 6-week program. For this first cohort, 11 scientists from 7 countries were selected for this course. The aim of the CRISPR Training in gene editing for African national program scientists is to foster innovation in providing traits needed for improved crop varieties. While the technical aspects of the academy are directly managed by the staff of UC-Davis, ICRAF supports the organizational and logistical matters of the academy.