We are excited to celebrate another milestone at CenGen: The successful loading of our very first RNA flow cell on the Oxford Nanopore PromethION 2 Solo sequencer! This marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter as we venture into plant transcriptomics and gene annotation. Petruné Reitsma, who joined our …
Years of dedicated field trials in both South Africa and America have culminated in the publication of a peer-reviewed article on stem rust (and leaf rust). It is not all doom and gloom, as various genomic regions have been identified providing resistance to stem rust that can be bred into …
CenGen hosted a SACTA (South African Cultivar and Technology Agency)-funded geneWorkshop with exceptional grade 12 Agricultural Sciences learners from Sinenjongo Secondary School located in Milnerton. We were first introduced to the school by their Agricultural Sciences teacher, Mr Wilson Bope, who attended a geneTeachers Workshop in 2023. Because of his …
Herbicide resistant weeds are a global problem and are increasingly a challenge for local producers. There are various ongoing projects that try to tackle the problem with focused efforts to collectively address this as an industry. Through a DSTI-TIA-GrainSA initiative, the Herbicide Action and Resistance Platform (HARP) was formed and …
The CenGen team in collaboration with Provar with funding from HORTGRO are doing very exciting work aimed at exploiting DNA markers to the benefit of the pome fruit industry. Anna Mouton wrote two articles, Genetic fingerprinting of apple rootstocks (p. 60) and Developing genetic tests for pome fruit (p. 68), …
Ayesha was recently awarded her PhD (Plant pathology, Stellenbosch University) for her study: Genetic and biochemical investigation of resistance to Fusarium and Gibberella ear rot in South African maize. The CenGen team will miss your visits to the lab. All the best for your new position with Corteva AgriscienceTM!
Our exciting project to sequence local South African barley varieties featured in the March edition of SA Graan/Grain magazine! Read more on page 62 of the March edition:
CenGen has relied heavily on the fragment analysis services provided by the DNA Sequencing Unit of the Central Analytical Facility (Stellenbosch) over the past 23 years of our existence. The two teams only recently managed to get together to celebrate the thousands of samples and millions of data points generated …
We’re happy to welcome Ms Ferran Kelly, fourth year student at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) and intern at CenGen for 2026! Ferran is taking over from Nkosinathi Rathogwa, who was a DIPLOMICS Intern with us in 2025. Nkosinathi will be pursuing a BSc Honours degree at the …
Cover picture credit: ZA Pretorius In 1998 Renée approached the well-known plant pathologist Prof Sakkie (Zack) Pretorius of the University of Free State to ask him to collaborate on the very first wheat QTL mapping study in South Africa. Together with the former company PANNAR SEED a career-long collaboration with …
