Blog
Annual meeting at Sokoine University of Agriculture
Annual meetings are being conducted at Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) in Morogoro, Tanzania after being hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Face-to-face meetings are deemed to be incomparable to Zoom meetings since it makes personal inspection of the rice in the screen houses and raising discussions on current challenges easier.
Student presentations are essential in these annual meetings. Each student is given the opportunity to present their research and obtain valuable feedback from the scientists involved.
The project has been productive with 10 published papers and at least 10 more were submitted in 3 years. However, there has been some delay due to a difficult start and because of newly installed rules and regulations at SUA requiring MSc students to have one paper published and another submitted before their defense. Similar rules are applied to Ph.D. students. Therefore, it has been found necessary to extend the scholarships to MSc students to be able to hand in their theses on time.
A large number of genotypes have been screened for tolerance to salinity or anaerobic germination. Results show that only the submergence component is seriously delayed. As a solution, a huge submergence facility that enables the screening of hundreds of genotypes in various stages of their development is currently under construction to be able to catch up with the delays within the next year. Additionally, the submergence component has been strengthened by a Ph.D. student whose work is dedicated to flood tolerance of African genotypes.
Now, a state-of-the-art submergence facility that will be used for submergence tolerance is being established at SUA. This facility will be the only existing one in the region and will therefore provide SUA a competitive edge in the field of research for flood tolerance of rice.