The Agriculture University of Athens (AUA) is visiting Uganda Christian University (UCU) Faculty of Agricultural Sciences under a bilateral agreement between the universities in an ERASMUS+ project over this week. A number of activities are planned to take place including and not limited to two guest lectures on exploring epigenetics in plant breeding and conservation of landraces or indigenous crop varieties, a visit to farmers UCU has been working alongside and a tour of the faculty and a cultural experience at Ndere Centre.
The team from AUA led by Prof. Penelope Bebeli made a passionate presentation on the importance of landraces and the work that they have done as a university to conserve Greek landraces. She challenged the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and he community generally at UCU to consider the importance of Landraces because they not only speak into our rich cultures, and heritage but also tell a story of resilience.
A landrace is a domesticated, locally adapted, often traditional variety of a species of plant that has developed over time, through adaptation to its natural and cultural environment of agriculture and pastoralism, and due to isolation from other populations of the species.
Prof. Penelope also challenged the university to support farmers to register in the national registry land races under UNESCO’s Intangible cultural Heritage for posterity.
In the area of molecular breeding Prof. Eleni Tani challenged the team to integrate for a wholistic approach the -omics approach to better understand the diversity within and between our landrace species. That is to say to look at the plant right from the genome, is proteins and its metabolites on top of understanding how physically different they are. At AUA, she mentioned, metabolomics has been used to select for drought tolerance during breeding of superior grape plants and she presented their findings in different studies on the same.
This visit will foster further collaboration and promote both cultural and knowledge exchange with the hope that it will open more doors in what can be done together in terms of research, knowledge dissemination, postgraduate training and research said Elizabeth Kizito, the Director Research, Partnerships & Innovation and an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences.
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