Plant & Animal Genomes XIV Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XIV ConferenceJanuary 14-18, 2006
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
The African Biofortified Sorghum (ABS) Project, a joint project of a consortium consisting of Africa Harvest, eight other African organizations and of Pioneer-Dupont, has received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to develop nutritionally enhanced sorghum for the arid and semi-arid tropical areas of Africa.
Sorghum, the fifth most important cereal crop in the world, is one of the most important staple crops in Africa and represents the only viable food grain for many of the world’s most food insecure people. Sorghum grain has a nutritional profile similar to corn and other cereals, i.e. it shares the typical nutritional deficiencies of cereal grains, a low content of several essential amino acids, a low vitamin A and E content and a low bio-availability of iron and zinc. Therefore, a diet, based mostly on sorghum, is not adequate to meet the nutritional growth or maintenance requirements for children and adults and needs to be supplemented with essential amino acids and micronutrients. Further, most sorghum food is cooked or heated during preparation. In contrast to other cereal grains, heat treatment results in a severely reduced digestibility of sorghum grain (up to 50%).
The goal of the ABS project is to develop transgenic sorghum varieties that will overcome most of the described nutritional deficiencies by substantially improving grain digestibility, by delivering vitamins, the essential amino acids lysine, threonine and tryptophan, and by improving the bioavailability of iron and zinc.
The development of the improved sorghum lines will rely on transgenes and technologies that have shown high efficacy in transgenic maize and that resulted in a significantly improved nutritional quality of maize grain. As a proof of concept, a first generation transgenic sorghum line that possesses grain with a 50% increase in lysine has already been developed. The genes and technologies used for this project will be discussed in more detail during the presentation.