We are excited to welcome two new team members at CenGen this month! Michaela-Anne White (pictured left) is currently finishing up a Masters’ degree in Plant Breeding and Genetics at Stellenbosch University, where she focused on disease resistance and developing new methods for greenhouse screening of pathogens. At CenGen she …
By the end of February 2023, CenGen Project Lead Shannon Derman will be leaving us to spread her wings to Europe. She has been selected as one of only eleven candidates in the world for a very prestigious PhD-position offered by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral EpiseedLink programme! The programme will …
Our Spekboom sequencing project has now also sparked interest from the popular press! Journalist Engela Duvenhage recently published an article on our endeavours in the AA Traveller magazine (AA Reisiger in Afrikaans). Thank you for sharing our story with travellers and nature lovers, Engela! The article can be read online …
After a very successful visit from our UK project collaborators, Drs. Steurnagel and Wouters, Ms Shannon Derman jetted off to the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, to learn more about the bioinformatics analysis of the Spekboom sequencing data that we generated here during the two weeks’ visit in October. …
We are excited to be featured in the November edition of SA Grain magazine! CenGen has grown exponentially over the past few years, and with our 20 year anniversary approaching in 2023, we are very proud of what we have achieved. Thank you to SA Grain for sharing our story …
After ten days of intense learning and knowledge transfer, we presented an update on the progress of the Spekboom project. The Centre for Proteomics and Genomics Research (CPGR) hosted us at their brand-new facilities in Woodstock, Cape Town. Dr Renée Prins gave a brief project overview, followed by Drs Roland …
Dr Burkhard Steuernagel joined us this week to start with the data analysis of the ONT sequencing runs. Whilst some team members are continuing to extract bucket-loads of HMW gDNA, the rest of the team kicked off with high-accuracy base calling. Pictured above are Burkhard, Roland Wouters, Kelly Breeds and Elsabet Wessels. What …
Cover picture: Pieter Burger, Syngenta For two days in September this year, the normally (seemingly) peaceful Syngenta/Sensako research station at Napier was transformed to a bustling scene of demonstrations, talks, knowledge transfer and liaising at the inaugural Syngenta Knowledge Hub event. Producers and other stakeholders in the agricultural industry were …
Read some more on how we collaborate to get the Spekboom job done here! On the cover picture: Alana Crotz and Shannon Derman (CenGen) with Alvera Vorster from CAF and Roland Wouters from JIC discussing High Molecular Weight DNA extraction protocols.
CenGen has a long-standing link to scientists at John Innes Centre, UK. Dr Burkhard Steuernagel has shared his experience on the bioinformatics analysis of the complex wheat genome with SA plant scientists multiple times. He has now sent a research scientist from his group, Dr Roland Wouters, to support the …
