Christopher Bendana – July 25, 2018
Dr. Priver Namanya adjusted her view in the microscope, trying to get a better image of the banana cells. Then a smile lit her face. After spending the day trying to ascertain that she had incorporated a vitamin A gene into the banana cells, she had achieved success.
Namanya, a plant biotechnologist at the National Agricultural Research Laboratories (NARL) in Kawanda, Uganda, has been doing this kind of work for the last 10 years, thanks to the training she received in Australia.
She’s one of hundreds of African scientists, and assorted scientific research projects, to benefit from international collaborations in the highly specialized field of agricultural biotechnology. These partnerships have greatly advanced public sector work on such important food crops as maize, cassava, rice and in the case of Namayana, an East African highland banana known locally as matooke.
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