Healthy Crops

The Healthy Crops Project is an international research project with the aim to achieve significant yield increases for small scale producers in Africa and Asia by providing disease resistant rice varieties that can be introgressed with local elite lines. To reach our goals we already developed a strategy to combat bacterial blight (BB) of rice, one of the most devastating rice diseases with a significant impact on small scale producers in low and middle-income countries. The team has already successfully generated BB-resistant rice lines and created a diagnostic toolbox that enables a rapid disease diagnosis of the newly occurring pathogenic bacterial strains (both published in Nature Biotechnology in 2019). Recently, the team further reported the discovery of a blight outbreak in Tanzania and presented a modified an African rice variety resistant to the pathogen. By now, we are working on a broad range of disease resistance that we want to offer to smallholder farmers in future.