From 23 to 26 September 2018, four CenGen members (Renée Prins, Corneli de Klerk, Kelly Breeds and Lizaan Rademeyer) along with Marizanne Horn (Sensako) attended the 15th International Cereal Rusts and Powdery Mildews Conference 2018 in Skukuza. The conference focused on these two diseases in barley and wheat and was attended by leading researchers in the fields of pathogen epidemiology, pathology and genomics.
Lizaan Rademeyer and Kelly Breeds attended the AB InBev Grower’s Appreciation day at the SA Barley Breeding Institute (SABBI) at Caledon on 20 September. It is an annual event aimed at recognising the partnership between AB InBev and local barley producers, as well as at showcasing the South African barley breeding and malting processes, bearing on AB Inbev’s apt new logo We’re here for the beer.
CenGen’s staff hit the road to quite a number of diverse commitments in September. Corneli de Klerk presented a talk at the SANSOR Recapping Workshop on Wheat in Napier on 4 September. She informed the attendees about marker-assisted selection (MAS) – how it works and what value it adds to breeding programmes.
As a follow up on the very successful Bioinformatics and Wheat Genomics workshop held in Worcester in June 2017, the UK Science UK Science & Innovation Network (South Africa) will be hosting a second workshop in Worcester on 4-8 February 2019.
The second producers’ day of the Western Cape season was hosted by Overberg Agri at Roodebloem, Caledon, on 30 August.
The annual SSK Winter Grain Day hosted in conjunction with Joubert Boerdery and the Western Cape Department of Agriculture at Uitkyk, Riversdale, is an event that attracts many visitors. On 22 August, producers had the opportunity to attend talks on current topics such as land reform and visit trial sites to learn about new wheat, canola, barley and cover crop varieties as well as advances in agricultural practices.
At the end of June, Kelly Breeds attended the Second International Barley Mutants Workshop (IBMW2018) at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, Scotland. This centre of excellence for barley research was the second host for this workshop that aims to bring together scientists who use barley mutant resources to understand several fundamental aspects and processes of cereal crop genetics and biology – an approach that has proved to be highly successful in the past 10 years.
CenGen celebrated their 15th birthday in style on 31 May 2018. At the same time, new, state of the art LGC robotic systems for high-throughput sample processing were inaugurated.
Three University of the Free State (UFS) students who have had ties with CenGen will be awarded their respective degrees at the June 2018 graduation ceremony in Bloemfontein. CenGen has, to a greater or lesser extent, been involved with the studies of Hester van Schalkwyk (PhD), Tegwe Soko (PhD) and Gerna Maree (MSc Agric).
Professor Simon Krattinger, cereal genomics researcher at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia and formerly from the University of Zürich, recently visited CenGen.
