Hub Staff
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Santie deVilliers, PhD
 Scientist Unit: International Crops Research Instititute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Santie de Villiers is a scientist with ICRISAT, based in Nairobi. ICRISAT, in collaboration with national program partners in Africa, is building capacity in plant biotechnology, focusing specifically on genetic engineering and marker-assisted breeding applications in sorghum, millet, pigeonpea, chickpea and groundnut. Santie is responsible for the transfer of legume genetic transformation technology, particularly for pigeonpeas and groundnuts, from ICRISAT-India to eastern and southern Africa in collaboration with national programs. Genetic engineering of pigeonpea with Bt genes can provide resistance to pod borers, a major pest of this crop in Africa, to which no resistance exists in compatible relatives. For groundnut, resistance to fungi and drought will greatly enhance the productivity of the crop.Santie works locally with National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) as well as international institutions, for improving access to appropriate research facilities, developing proposals, training of technicians and scientists and supervising post-graduate students in pigeonpea and groundnut tissue culture and transformation. She is also involved in coordinating marker-assisted backcrossing of quantitative trait loci for staygreen drought tolerance into sorghum and downy mildew resistance into pearl millet. Another project on which she worked, and that has been recently completed, focused on the environmental risk assessment of genetically engineered sorghum in Mali and Kenya; the frequency of gene flow between cultivated and wild/weedy relatives was studied as an example to inform decision makers on the introduction of genetically modified sorghum into areas where cultivated sorghum co-exists with its wild relatives. |
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