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Moderated conference on Genomics in Food and Agriculture

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Sun, 10 Mar 2013 07:32:19 +0100
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I am Takele Taye Desta, a PhD student (Genetics) in The University of Nottingham, United Kingdom.

The majorities of a sort of omics works conducted so far in developing countries are related to genomics and in most instances these have been concentrated on genetic diversity studies. In fact dealing with genetic diversity and population structure is the entry point to work on omic disciplines. However, even these types of basic genomic works are by and large far from complete compared to the high level of genetic diversity existing in the least developed nations.

High levels of genetic improvement have been achieved for yield related traits. However, little (if any) effort has been made so far to improve genetic attributes related to hardiness. Genomic selection is a robust tool to bring genetic improvements of these kinds. In the era of alarming climate change we should have to think about robustness while developing breeds or varieties. In the meantime we also need to have deep knowledge on the efficiency of the production environments to maintain improved breeds (varieties). Genetic improvement alone may not bring magic solution if the production system is unable to support the additional genetic improvement gained.

Therefore, we need to devise an appropriate plan to exploit the wealth of adaptation traits embedded in traditional breeds through long lasting act of natural selection. This would create opportunity to introgress genes that confer hardiness (to low producing animals) to high yielding but susceptible animals. This is, however, not to say there is not any room for improvement of production traits given the large genetic variation that exists among indigenous breeds, but we need to combine yield traits with hardiness (though they are unfavourably correlated) to fit into the existing production system.

Omics require the state of art lab and computing facilities, knowledge and a carefully designed project. Therefore, all these things definitely require a substantial amount of resources which are largely beyond the capacity of most of the developing countries and hence support from developed nations is indispensable. In conclusion, we may need to develop special study protocols specifically to collect data on phenotypic traits used in association studies as the conventional type of data recording adopted in developed nations is entirely absent at smallholder farmers level.

Takele Taye Desta
Centre for Genetics and Genomics,
School of Biology,
University of Nottingham,
University Park, NG7 2RD,
Nottingham, 
UK
Email: takele_taye (at) yahoo.com

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