Publications by authors named "Melaku A Gedil"
Cassava is a starchy root crop cultivated in the tropics for fresh consumption and commercial processing. Primary selection objectives in cassava breeding include dry matter content and micronutrient density, particularly provitamin A carotenoids. These traits are negatively correlated in the African germplasm.
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- Accurate identification of crop cultivars is essential for evaluating the effectiveness of crop improvement research, but traditional methods (farmer interviews and morphological descriptors) can be uncertain.
- Genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) was applied to cassava varieties in Ghana, analyzing 917 accessions and comparing them to a reference library of known varieties.
- The study identified 11 major varieties, with 30% of farmer-accessed samples matching released cultivars, highlighting the potential of GBS for precise cultivar identification and suggesting a more cost-effective approach for tracking plant varieties.
Cassava mosaic disease (CMD), caused by different species of cassava mosaic geminiviruses (CMGs), is the most important disease of cassava in Africa and the Indian sub-continent. The cultivated cassava species is protected from CMD by polygenic resistance introgressed from the wild species Manihot glaziovii and a dominant monogenic type of resistance, named CMD2, discovered in African landraces. The ability of the monogenic resistance to confer high levels of resistance in different genetic backgrounds has led recently to its extensive usage in breeding across Africa as well as pre-emptive breeding in Latin America.
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