Tag Archives: Biotechnology

This report covers two projects, one on sweet potato viruses and one on cassava brown streak disease. They were linked through both being whitefly-transmitted viruses of root crops. The sweet potato virus disease (SPVD) project identified the whitefly-borne component of this disease in East Africa to be a serologically and …

With the aim of “feeding the people, not the weevils” this project is combining conventional breeding and biotechnology to combat the pernicious and devastating consequences of sweetpotato weevil. Results to date include the identification of three insecticidal proteins and the introduction of putative resistance genes into sweetpotato varieties. The resistance …

Transformation of sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas) with serine-type proteinase inhibitors (Pls) offer a new strategy for developing host resistance against sweetpotato weevil (Cyclas spp.), the major threat to sweetpotato worldwide. This paper describes the Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of sweetpotato with a soybean kunitz trypsin inhibitor (SKTI-4) cDNA clone and the analysis of recombinant …