The challenge
The vision of HarvestPlus is to reduce child malnutrition by 30% in Africa by 2020. Cassava is a starchy shrub whose carbohydrate-rich roots form a staple food in West Africa. The HarvestPlus project at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) is using mass selection in breeding to increase provitamin A (beta-carotene) in cassava roots to address malnutrition, but the process involves screening of thousands of seedlings. Once a root is pulled from the field, it must be analyzed within hours for a decision on selection for the stem for planting, or the stem dries up after few days and won’t survive replanting. With a lab that could only deliver results within days and for hundreds of samples, the goal of HarvestPlus seemed distant.
The solution
Dr. Maroya with International Potato Center met BioAnalyt in 2011 and a solution began to materialize. Following his publication on measuring carotenoids in cassava, Dr. Peter Kulakow and Elizabeth Parkes partnered with BioAnalyt in 2012 to implement iCheck Carotene, a rapid, field-friendly testing method for the determination of beta-carotene in fresh and processed cassava. In tandem with developing iCheck, BioAnalyt is also contributing training, technical advisory, protocol development and reference materials to HarvestPlus program.
“Making sure we have quality data is very important, because based on that measurement we decide which progeny is selected & which breeding techniques to deploy.“
Elizabeth Parkes, Cassava Breeder, HarvestPlus
The result
iCheck Carotene enables faster and more cost-effective detection of betacarotene in cassava. By identifying the cassava progenies or clones with the most pro-vitamin A, BioAnalyt is helping HarvestPlus to get as many micronutrients as possible into people’s diets – as well as giving local farmers greater access to high-yielding, vitamin A rich varieties.
Explore further on how to measure nutrients in whole cassava plant, read here
