Mars collaborates to sequence Africa's neglected food crops

Abstract

A scientist at Mars pledged to work with American and Chinese collaborators to make the genomic data of almost 100 of Africa’s orphan crops publicly available on the internet. Howard-Yana Shapiro, chief agricultural officer at the confectionery and animal food company Mars in McLean, Virginia, made this statement at the G-8 International Conference in Washington in June. Shapiro led a partnership that sequenced, assembled and annotated the cacao (cocoa) genome in 2010 and made the data freely available to all researchers. The $40-million African Orphan Crop Consortium (AOCC), which includes the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), Life Technologies, the World Wildlife Fund, the University of California, Davis (UCD), Mars and others, was set up in 2011 at the Clinton Global Initiatives conference.