News Articles

On August 1st 2019, Mignon de Jager joined the CenGen team as an intern to assist the barley- and commercial projects with data generation and administrative duties.

Dr Lance Maphosa (Crop Physiologist with the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, Australia) visited CenGen on the 15th of July 2019. Although Lance currently focusses his attention and research primarily on pulses such as chickpeas and lentils, he has been involved in several projects that focused on the performance of wheat under drought and high temperature conditions.

CenGen is very excited to announce the upcoming visit of Dr Lancelot Maphosa to our laboratory in Worcester on 15 July 2019. Dr Maphosa, who, during his early career, was a research assistant at Sensako, is currently a Crop Physiologist with the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries in Australia.

In May 2019, as part of their partnership with CenGen, DIPLOMICS, an initiative of the Department of Sciences and Technology (DST), has generously arranged for Dr Fabian Grandke, field applications specialist in bioinformatics from ThermoFisher Scientific, to present a two day introductory course in the software package R to the CenGen team.

The CenGen team recently hosted three honours students from Stellenbosch University’s (SU) Department of Genetics. The three ladies visited the lab as part of their practical training for a course module in plant breeding.

In March 2019 CenGen was privileged to gain a new team member, Ms Kirsty Botha. Kirsty completed a master’s degree at the University of Pretoria in 2017, specialising in plant physiology and biotechnology.

Funding provided by the UK Science and Innovation Network in South Africa enabled the hosting of the highly successful Bioinformatics and Wheat Genomics II workshop in Worcester (SA), which focused on the discipline-specific training in bioinformatics and wheat genomics of scientists from the African continent.

DIPLOMICS, an initiative of the Department of Sciences and Technology (DST), recently placed a QuantStudio 5 Real-Time PCR System along with two other instruments at CenGen. This is part of DIPLOMICS’ goal to strengthen infrastructure capacity at service laboratories in South Africa.

Four CenGen staff members (Renée Prins, Lizaan Rademeyer, Kelly Breeds and Elsabet Wessels) and Marizanne Horn (Sensako) were privileged to receive training in population genetics in the comfort of their own laboratory on 29 January 2019.

On 21-22 January 2019, André du Toit, wheat breeder from PANNAR, visited CenGen for an annual project meeting. As part of the molecular service laboratory (MSL), CenGen delivers a service to the wheat breeding programmes of PANNAR and Sensako by screening their breeding lines for genes that they’re interested in.